Ice storm could be worst in a decade
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Atlanta (CNN) -- After icing parts of Texas,
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, a winter storm arrived Wednesday in
Georgia, dropping a mix of ice and rain that was expected to continue
pelting the Southeast into Thursday.
Up to three-quarters of
an inch of ice was expected to accumulate on Atlanta and up to 10 inches
of snow and sleet on Charlotte, North Carolina, making travel
treacherous.
Area residents had heeded
ample warnings issued by forecasters, emptying grocery store shelves,
filling up their tanks with gas and filling their trunks with salt.
In Atlanta, the city that
couldn't get out of its own way after a 2.6-inch snowfall two weeks
ago, road crews were staged along nearly empty highways -- not that it
mattered, as the roads were largely deserted during the typically
crowded morning commute.
It appeared the thousands
of commuters who spent up to 20 hours stuck on the city's highways last
month had learned their lessons.
A low-pressure weather
system is expected to move up the East Coast, dropping snow on the
Northeast, with 4 to 8 inches predicted for Washington and 6 to 10
inches on New York from midnight Wednesday into the day Thursday.
National Weather Service
forecasters say the storm -- packed with sleet, snow, rain and ice -- is
a potentially "catastrophic event."
"This is one of Mother
Nature's worst kinds of storms that can be inflicted on the South,"
Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal told reporters Tuesday afternoon. "That is ice.
It is our biggest enemy."
Power outages
In Georgia, more than
400 members of the National Guard were deployed for weather duty, and
about 100 each for the Carolinas and Alabama. The National Guard also
opened 35 of its armories in Georgia to be repurposed as shelters and
warming centers, CNN affiliate WSB-TV reported.
Sleet and freezing rain
began falling across Georgia early Wednesday, causing scattered power
outages. Thousands of outages were reported in Alabama, South Carolina
and North Carolina as well, but of the 144,000 customers without power
in the Southeast, more than 100,000 of those were in Georgia.
The power companies said Wednesday morning they expect those numbers to rise over the next 24 hours.
Georgia Power, the
state's largest utility, warned that hundreds of thousands of customers
could be without electricity "for days."
"This has the
opportunity to be a huge event when you're talking about the amount of
ice you're looking at," Aaron Strickland, the emergency operations chief
for the power company, told reporters.
The utility staged fleets of trucks across the area. Teams from Florida, Texas and Ohio bolstered local line crews.
