Texarkana Braces for Possible Ice Storm Praying Not Like in 2000
The Texarkana area is under a Winter Weather Advisory from the National Weather Service with the potential of freezing rain or a winter mix with some ice accumulation possible.
I don't know about you but every time I hear mention of ice in the weather forecasts I automatically think of the Christmas Day ice storm of 2000 when it shut down Texarkana and pretty much the entire state of Arkansas.
It's funny how the world was bracing for Y2k, a computer bug shutdown but instead, we got perhaps the ice storm of the century. Local weather meteorologists called it the perfect storm what started out as rain that morning led to freezing rain and sleet and lasted well into the late overnight hours. The heavy ice brought down trees that had been in Texarkana for centuries falling on power lines and in people's backyards. It sounded like shotguns going off as trees were popping all around the neighborhoods as folks huddled around one another to stay warm with flashlights and candles due to not having any power.
The ice storm of 2000 crippled Texarkana and the whole state for weeks as power crews from all over the country came into the area to help restore power. The rural areas took an even bigger hit and it took several weeks before power was restored. It was a mess.
The bitter cold temperatures hung around for weeks making it very difficult to get things done as well as clean up the debris from fallen trees. The ice storm of 2000 was so bad that in fact, if you look at some of the trees today around Texarkana they never fully recovered from that dismal day.
Texarkana was tested in so many ways, as stores ran out of everything and emergency generators were bought up like they were going out of style. Unfortunately, some generators were being stolen from would-be thieves, I guess you could say Texarkana went into somewhat of a panic mode but as bad as it was there were many more people doing good things to help neighbors during the difficult times including offering their homes for shelter if they had electricity, helping folks clean up from the ice storm damage.
Hopefully, we all learned something from that ice storm and will be better prepared if it happens again. So, with that being said, you better make a trip to the store just in case. At least that's what we Southerners do in this part of the country and we don't care if our northern friends think it's funny. Let's just hope it's centuries before we have to deal with something this bad again. TxDot will be out pretreating roads bridges and overpasses today in the event we get any ice accumulation over the next couple of days.
According to the National Weather Service, it was the worst ice storm since 1819.
Here's a weather report from KSLA-12 Shreveport from this morning January 30, 2023.