Fortunately, the ice storm here remains largely to be a bust from what it was hyped up to be. Freezing rain came down last night, but well short of the expected accumulation of .25". Average ice accumulation was put at approximately 1/8". Streets and sidewalks remained wet. Not much ice had built up on the trees, so they didn't bend much. No power outages. Tonight's wave looks more of the same, except the temp may be just barely enough above freezing to help prevent more ice accumulation. Anyway, NWS forecast has .1 to .2" more accumulation. Sunday night will be the last of it when temps will raise above 40 with new rainfall amounts between a half and three quarters of an inch possible. But Oklahoma City TV weathermen expect downpours for Sunday night with amounts going over an inch in Stillwater. We'll see how that hype pans out.
City of Stillwater Emergency Management Agency statement on the ice situation as of 8pm Saturday:
Hey fb friends,
We have visited with law enforcement in the area and there are no reports of any travel problems. A few accidents had occurred but the reason was not weather related. With the heavy rainfall we want to remind you that there is some ponding occurring.
Field Services will have crews on overnight and tomorrow through noon, as a precaution.
SEU is working a small outage. The cause of the outage was not known at the time of this update.
The majority of the moisture we were receiving was in the form of moderate rain. We stopped at several locations and measured the ice accumulations and found that it varied significantly. We did see ice as little as a thin coat to just over a 1/4". We expect the accumulations could grow overnight, but not significantly.
We will report to work in the morning around 4am to check the roads, the weather and update social media. If we begin experiencing problems that are determined to be weather related, we will go in sooner.
Stay safe, drive slow and stay warm. ~em
