Ice Storm Causes Blackouts, Deaths
Pastor Dale Morgan
Ice Storm Causes Blackouts, Deaths*
By KEN MILLER,
Associated Press Writer
OKLAHOMA CITY - A wintry storm caked the center of the nation with a
thick layer of ice Monday, blacking out more than 600,000 homes and
businesses, and more icy weather was on the way. At least 17 deaths in
Oklahoma and Missouri were blamed on the conditions, with 15 of them
killed on slick highways.
A state of emergency was declared for all of Oklahoma, where the sound
of branches snapping under the weight of the ice echoed through Oklahoma
City.
"You can hear them falling everywhere," Lonnie Compton said Monday as he
shoveled ice off his driveway.
The National Weather Service posted ice and winter storm warnings
Tuesday for parts of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Illinois.
Missouri declared an emergency on Sunday and put the National Guard on
alert.
Oklahoma utilities said a half-million customers were blacked out as
power lines snapped under the weight of ice and falling tree branches,
the biggest power outage in state history, and utilities in Missouri
said more than 100,000 homes and business had no power there.
"If you do the math, probably one out of three Oklahomans has no
electricity at this point," said Gil Broyles, a spokesman for Oklahoma
Gas & Electric, the state's largest utility.
Roughly 11,000 customers were blacked out in southern Illinois and more
than 5,000 had no electric heat or lights in Kansas, where Gov. Kathleen
Sebelius declared a statewide state of emergency.
At O'Hare International Airport, about 200 flights were canceled Monday,
with delays of about 45 minutes, said Chicago Department of Aviation
spokeswoman Karen Pride. Fewer than a dozen flights were canceled at
Midway Airport, and a handful of flights were delayed about an hour, she
said.
Ice was as much as an inch thick on tree limbs and power lines in parts
of the region.
Schools across Oklahoma were closed and some hospitals were relying on
backup power generators. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the
Army Corps of Engineers sent 50 generators and three truckloads of
bottled water from Texas to distribute to blacked-out areas of Oklahoma.
Tulsa International Airport had no power for about 10 hours and halted
flight operations for the day, and most morning flights at Will Rogers
World Airport in Oklahoma City were canceled because of icy runways.
Greyhound bus passengers were stranded overnight at a shelter in a
church in Tulsa, and were joined by some local residents who had no heat.
Portions of Interstate 35 and Interstate 44 were shut down early Monday
afternoon in Oklahoma City after ice-laden power lines collapsed and
fell into the roadways.
Oklahoma utility officials said it could be a week or more before power
was fully restored.
"This is a big one. We've got a massive situation here and it's probably
going to be a week to 10 days before we get power on to everybody," said
Ed Bettinger, a spokesman for Public Service Company. "It looks like a
war zone."
The Oklahoma City suburb of Jones, a town of 2,500 people, had low water
pressure because there was no electricity to run well pumps, and
firefighters said an early morning fire destroyed most of the
community's high school.
Since the storm began, Tulsa firefighters have responded to dozens of
structural fires, most attributable to the storm, said Sheryl Lovelady,
a city spokeswoman. One person was killed by smoke inhalation in a
storm-related fire, she said; she did not provide details.
The icy weather stretched into the Northeast, where many schools across
upstate New York were closed or started late because of icy roads.
On ice-covered Interstate 40 west of Okemah, Okla., four people died in
"one huge cluster of an accident" that involved 11 vehicles, said
Highway Patrol Trooper Betsey Randolph.
Ten other people died on icy Oklahoma roads, and Missouri had two
storm-related deaths _ one on a slippery highway and another when a tree
limb fell on a 92-year-old man's head. In addition, a homeless person
died of hypothermia in Oklahoma City, the state medical examiner's
office said.
___
Associated Press writers Jeff Latzke in Oklahoma City, Marcus Kabel in
Springfield, Mo., John Milburn in Topeka, Kan., and Cheryl Wittenauer in
St. Louis contributed to this report.