Ice storm knocks out power for 175,000

The produce aisle of the Doylestown Acme looked like a vegetable morgue early Wednesday afternoon. A very dark vegetable morgue.

White, insulating shrouds covered the bins from arugula to zucchini, in hopes that the food would stay sufficiently cool until a massive area power outage ended.

"We had to close the store just to maintain our perishables," assistant manager Chuck Woodill said.

Central Bucks County appeared to be ground zero for the darkness wrought by a nasty overnight ice storm that brought down trees and power lines throughout the Philadelphia region, leaving close to 175,000 area homes and businesses in the dark at some point.

By early afternoon, about 40,000 Peco customers in Bucks County were without power, spokeswoman Karen Muldoon Geus said. About 22,000 more outages remained in Montgomery County, followed by 20,000 in Chester County, 17,000 in Delaware County, and 1,000 in Philadelphia.

That was in addition to thousands whose power was already restored, Gues said. In all, about 155,000 Peco customers lost power at some point, she said.

New Jersey's PSE&G, reported a peak of 20,000 outages by late morning. It serves parts of 11 counties from Gloucester County into the state's northeastern corner.

While those numbers were impressive, they were not in a league with the 549,100 outages that occurred as a result of the Jan 7, 1994 ice storm.

By late afternoon the ranks of Peco's powerless had withered to 30,000, while PSE&G was down to about 9,000.

But roughly 15,000 homes and businesses in Bucks County were still without electricity. Some were likely to remain so into Thursday night or Friday morning, according to Peco.

"No heat here, no heat at home. I do have a full tank of gas in the car," said state liquor store manager Tom Thompson, who had endured an 8:30 a.m. outage at his home in Plumstead, only to have his store in Doylestown go dark around 11.

Might those darkened shelves full of hooch behind him help with the personal heating issue?

"No, no, I don't do that," he said with a laugh. "When I go home I guess I'll be bailing the sump pump."

Fallen trees caused a number of road closings, and a large percentage of the region's schools were closed.

The region's miserable morning was the result of warm air aloft conspiring with stubbornly cold air near the surface.

Starting late Tuesday night, freezing rain – that's liquid precipitation that freezes on contact – fell for a period of five to eight hours. In the end, ice accumulations ranged from 0.1 inch in South Jersey to a disruptive 0.5 in the Pennsylvania suburbs, according to the National Weather Service.

Meteorologists were counting on winds from the east off the warmer Atlantic Ocean to scour out the cold air, said Paul Walker, a meteorologist with Accu-Weather Inc., but after winds from a more northerly direction had chilled the region, it turned out to be an epic battle.

The east winds did kick in, however by the time the steady rain began around 11 p.m., temperatures in and around Philadelphia were securely below freezing. They finally broke 32 at Philadelphia International Airport by 4 a.m.

For all of the ice that formed on area roads, the attendant mishaps were relatively sparse, police and emergency management officials in the region said.

Montgomery County's emergency center in Eagleville received a high volume of calls, said Tom Sullivan, the county's public safety director, but most were for ice-covered trees, or tree limbs, coming down and taking electric lines with them.

"We're active, but mostly in minor mode," Sullivan said. "With the temperature rising, there are some concerns with streets flooding, but we are mostly in good shape."

In Delaware County, "there's nothing we haven't seen before," said Edwin Truitt, the county's emergency services director.

The main problem there, as elsewhere, was downed trees and power lines, he said, causing outages. "When you have ice on branches and wires, bad things tend to happen," Truitt said.

The county emergency system itself had a power outage over night that caused it to go to battery power, then a backup generator, Truitt said. While phone and radio reports came in as usual, "we went back to the old fashioned way – paper," until computers re-booted, he said.

Chester County had several weather-related accidents but no serious injuries Wednesday morning. One of the crashes delayed commuters for a short time when northbound Route 202 was closed between Routes 30 and 401, said Patty Mains, a spokeswoman for the Department of Emergency Services.

The morning commute went fairly well in New Jersey, state police said.

There were no major incidents, just delays due to downed trees and power lines and icy conditions, Capt. Frank Davis said.

He said he expected an uneventful afternoon commute. "The temperature has been increasing, which has been favorable," Davis said.

The Willow Grove temperature didn't crack freezing until after 7 a.m. Around that same time, after the freezing rain had stopped out there, it reached 34 in gloomy Punxsutawney, Pa. Not surprisingly, the groundhog failed to see his shadow, the folkloric signal that spring is imminent.

One can hope that Punxsutawney Phil has better luck than the human forecasters who predicted a mild winter.

For now, the humans evidently aren't impressed with Phil's skills.

It won't rise above freezing today, more messy storms loom for the weekend and early next week, followed by more cold. The government's two-week outlook calls for temperatures to stay below normal for most of the country.