Winter Ice Could Humble the United States

Open up the government’s national weather-alert map, and pretty much the entire eastern half of the country is painted one color or another. A thick pink band stretches from New Mexico, across Texas, then through Pennsylvania, New York, and Vermont—a winter-storm warning. To the north, a dark-blue splotch around the Great Lakes—extreme-cold warning. And then a narrower, deep-purple band through the Southeast, from East Texas up through the Carolinas—ice-storm warning.

By Sunday, when the storm peaks, more than half of the people in the lower 48 will be experiencing some combination of snow, sleet, and freezing rain. Sixteen states and Washington, D.C., have declared states of emergency. Colder-than-usual air from Canada will drift across the eastern United States and meet up with an atmospheric river from the Pacific. The U.S. “didn’t have any hurricanes last year, but this is definitely the equivalent of a hurricane, from Texas to the Northeast,” in terms of its potential for power outages and wind damage, Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and the former chief scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told me. Those in the band with an ice-storm warning, he said, should think of “preparing for a hurricane—except it’s ice.” Many of these regions aren’t used to getting this kind of winter weather. And as one man in North Carolina posted on X, “Ice will humble you fast.”

“Two or three inches of snow, we can handle that,” Maribel Martinez-Mejia, the director of emergency preparedness for the North Central Texas Council of Governments, told me. But, she said, more than a quarter inch of ice is a challenge; her region could see about half an inch or more. That amount can add as much as 500 pounds of weight to a power line and cause an outage. “The power grid is vulnerable to ice,” Jason Shafer, a meteorologist and the chief innovation officer at PowerOutage.us, told me. “It’s hard to winterize the system,” in part because doing so is expensive. Many places don’t have the money to spend on that project, especially if ice is a rare threat. So lines snap, and trees do too—onto the lines, sometimes. One way to avoid that is to put the lines underground, but, Shafer said, “we built everything overhead in this country.”

Even if a power line doesn’t break, ice can make it so cold that it doesn’t send out enough power, Autumn McMahon, a vice president at Oklahoma Electric Cooperative, told me—“so linemen would have to go out and literally break the ice off of the power lines.” (Much of her state is expected to experience “considerable disruptions to daily life,” according to the National Weather Service.)

But before they can fix a line, workers have to be able to get to it. Ice makes that more difficult, Tony Robinson, a former administrator of FEMA Region 6 who now works for National Emergency Management and Response, told me. Utility companies are good at restoring power relatively quickly during a storm, but “if the ice is too bad and they’re not able to get their equipment to the site”—well, that slows things down. And delayed power restoration “is obviously concerning,” the Oklahoma-based meteorologist Alan Gerard told me, “especially since many homes in this part of the country are not insulated or prepped for cold weather.” Pipes can freeze or burst, and people could be without water.

This is the type of storm that can tighten the aperture of people’s lives for a time. Thousands of flights have already been canceled. The safest way to drive on an ice-slicked road is not to drive at all. In a power outage, keeping warm can mean hunkering down in one room of the house, blanketing the windows and doors overnight, and staying put.

Then there’s the snow. Snow poses far less of a risk of power outages than ice does, but it is a hazard on roads, especially in areas that may not have snow plows. But even then, ice is a sneaky villain: States are aggressively pretreating their roads for snow and sleet, “but with freezing rain, it just washes that away, and then you’re left with an ice rink,” Rachel Riley, the director of the Southern Climate Impacts Planning Program, told me. Maue is particularly concerned about areas that get ice then snow, which can create a crust on surfaces that’s then difficult to shovel.

Whatever version of frozen water hits the ground this weekend will linger. Much of the country will remain cold into next week or even into early February. Icy piles of snow will line icy sidewalks that line plowed and salted roads. Maue has been saying that the country will be “entombed” in ice.

But some areas are just going to be quite cold, with a fresh layer of snow—a relative rarity in some of those places. That can bring unfamiliar challenges but also unfamiliar delights. Kids may have “their first real snow,” North Carolina Governor Josh Stein said at a press briefing yesterday. But much of the state, he said, will see not snow, but ice. Today, he took a more urgent tone, telling residents to be prepared to be stuck at home for a few days. “This is a serious storm,” he said. “We are taking it seriously, and so should you.”