Yesterday, my colleagues and I spent most of the afternoon telling you what a horrible idea it would be to leave the house this morning. Around the same time, my boss let me know that, because one of our hosts was having trouble getting a flight back into town, I’d need to leave the house this morning and drive 35 miles to Dallas to anchor the midday shift.
“That’s fine,” I thought confidently. “I’m from Ohio, the Driving-On-Ice State!”
So this morning, I woke up an hour early, knowing it might take an extra hour to make the trek into the newsroom.
But I haven’t lived in Ohio (the Carefully-Recalculating-The-Time-Of-Your-Commute State!) for ten years, and we haven’t had a good ice storm in north Texas for three years (You might remember a headline or two about the last big one). So I walked out of my house this morning and realized I had forgotten a key piece of the driving-on-ice puzzle:
That’s not snow, either. That’s tightly packed ice. I even went back inside and got my tape measure (I also decided, since I’d be late anyway, to make an omelet) and found it was about 3/4″ thick.
After all this time away from winter weather, I’ve been softened to the point where I can’t remember the last time I saw my ice scraper. Instead, I had to use the handle of a swiffer to chip away at the ice and then sweep it off the hood.
North Texas has a poor reputation for the way it handles winter weather, and that reputation has some merit. My colleague, Mark, sent me a text yesterday saying his Kroger in Plano was packed with people picking the place clean.
Usually, I hate doing “man on the street” interviews. They require a very broad definition of the word “news,” but in this case, the witnesses provided some much needed perspective in defense of the way Texas reacts to an ice storm.
“How was it in there?” I asked one woman as she loaded groceries into her car.
“It was crazy!” she said. “I couldn’t even get anything I needed.”
“Is everyone panicking?” I asked. “It’s only going to be cold for a few days.”
“No, no, no,” she explained. “If people thought this was going to be a disaster, there’d be a run on bottled water. Look at what everyone’s coming out with: chicken, beef and vegetables. Everyone’s just rushing to the store in time to make some soup.”
She was absolutely right: it’s perfect soup weather, and Texas knows it. In fact, I’m a little worried now that the state’s electric grid might buckle under the demand from all these crock pots.
