“What is with the buying of milk and bread pre snowstorms?” a Nashville transplant texted me on Jan. 21. I had to explain the primary Winter Disaster Preparedness Rule in the South: Buy bread and milk. When snow is predicted and you live in a town with a paucity of snowplows (whether or not they have cute names like Dolly Plowton), you can expect to be housebound for days.
But we didn’t get a snowstorm, which generally leaves the power on and milk safe in the fridge. What we got was an ice storm. Of the many precipitation options with a winter storm — among them snow, sleet, freezing rain, freezing fog (new to me until last week) — freezing rain is the worst. Freezing rain coats every available surface with ice.
Ice turns roads into skating rinks, bridges into launchpads, power lines into gravity-pulled cables bound for the ground. Ice coats every branch and twig of every hardwood tree, every needle of every evergreen. Ice brings mighty oaks crashing down, smashing cars and houses, blocking roads and taking down any power lines not already felled by ice. An ice storm will bring a Southern city to its knees.
“We’re ready,” Nashville Electric Service wrote to customers in an email before the front moved in. I took this vow with a grain of salt. Ready for what some of the models predicted, yes. But no one could be ready for the worst-case scenario, and the worst-case scenario is what we got.
“Some say the world will end in fire, / Some say in ice,” wrote the poet Robert Frost. Climate change notwithstanding, I now hold with those who favor ice. On Jan. 24, Nashville got hit by what felt like a world-ending ice storm. Three-quarters of an inch of ice in some places — more ice than I have ever seen in an ice storm. We are just beginning to reckon with the devastation it caused.
It started with snow, that soft light-magnifying, sound-muffling sweetness that drives squealing, insufficiently dressed Southern children to the closest hill with makeshift sleds. For adults, snow means canceled plans and risky driving and far too many loads of laundry. For children, snow means a holiday, even when it comes on a Saturday and might not last long enough to cancel school.
But this time the snow was followed immediately by a long round of freezing rain. Our power went out at 4:40 Sunday morning. By then the ice was already thick on the trees. My husband and I lay in bed and listened in the sudden silence as tree branch after tree branch cracked, gave way, and hit the ground.
Back in 1994’s historic winter storm, my brother and sister-in-law were on the Interstate, heading south, when the ice swept in and brought highway traffic to a crawl. Again and again, in the North Alabama forest surrounding them, ice fell from the trees and shattered, a sound my brother described as a million chandeliers crashing to the ground at once.
I’ve always remembered that description, and I will admit to having hoped, foolishly, that I might someday hear that sound myself.
What my husband I heard in the wee hours of last Sunday morning was nothing like the shattering of chandelier crystals. As I wrote on Instagram, it was more like gunshots: Pow pow pow pow pow pow pow. Coming singly and in clusters, the shots were the sounds of heavy, ice-encased tree limbs snapping, each shot followed by the whoosh of the fall, the whomp of the impact, sometimes on the roof just above our heads. Then came the high ringing of ice shards scattering across ice-hard ground.
When the wan light of gray morning finally dawned, it was clear that every tree in our yard was damaged, some of them beyond saving, even with skilled pruning. The pine tree just past our bedroom window lost nearly every limb; only the very topmost branches made it through the storm. I was happy to see that at least the owl house mounted on the tree’s trunk, and the squirrel that has been sheltering in it all winter, came through unscathed.
Here and across the South, my fellow humans didn’t fare nearly so well. Losing electricity in temperate weather is one thing — I had a truly lovely time after a derecho hit Nashville during the spring of 2020 — but losing electricity in the brutal cold is something else altogether. This time the power outage affected some 230,000 people, the largest outage in Nashville history. And it came when nighttime wind chill indexes were well below zero. Without heat, people die in weather like that.
But let me tell you, Nashville is great in a crisis. Lots of communities are great in a crisis, human beings in general tend to be great in a crisis, but this is the town I know best, and I am always heartened to be reminded anew that people here take care of one another.
The city, joining nonprofits already serving the homeless, has opened emergency overnight shelters and set up warming stations at firehouses and police stations; in case you can’t get there on your own, nightly texts and robocalls provide the number to call for a ride. Restaurant owners cooked food they couldn’t refrigerate and gave it away, turning misfortune into a bundled-up block party. People with power took in neighbors, or brought over blankets and hot soup, or set up spare space heaters and ran extension cords to them from their own generators. Sure, there’s been some grousing, but if there’s a way to help, people here will help.
The Tennessee National Guard is helping with brush clearing and giving rides to shelters, too. FEMA has dispatched some resources to storm-ravaged states, but it isn’t yet clear how much long-term help we can expect from the downsized agency relative to federal help during earlier disasters.
Climate change is making extreme weather like heat waves and ice storms more extreme. With U.S. policy now undermining international climate goals, it’s clear that we’ll be needing each other more than ever.
For five long days last week, my neighborhood had no power as the more than 1,000 linemen working 14- to 16-hour shifts for Nashville Electric Service played Whac-a-Mole in the cold, restoring power to some households while ice-laden trees continued to fall and knock out power to others. By Friday afternoon, more than 70,000 customers remained in the dark, according to the utility’s outage map.
Meanwhile, the weekend forecast once again called for wind chill values near zero. Unless they could afford a hotel, or left home for a shelter, or a neighbor took them in, tens of thousands of people in Nashville were about to be left out in the cold once more.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of “The Comfort of Crows” and the forthcoming children’s book “The Weedy Garden.”
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