A student walked to class Tuesday at Sunset High School in Dallas on yet another chilly day -- but the sun was out and helped melt some of the remaining ice from last week's storm.
By MICHAEL E. YOUNG
Staff Writer
myoung@dallasnews.com
Published: 10 December 2013 10:30 PM
Updated: 10 December 2013 10:49 PM
With the ice gradually disappearing from North Texas highways and electric power restored after last week’s deadly storm, the agencies tasked with keeping the region running began figuring out how they can do better the next time.
“Everybody’s asking, ‘Didn’t you learn anything from the Super Bowl?’” said Tony Hartzel, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Transportation in Dallas. “We did start using plows, and we’re using straight salt on the ice in some areas.
“We used everything in our arsenal from the beginning. We pre-treated, put out sand and salt and magnesium chloride, and in Denton we used straight salt after we scraped and plowed Interstate 35,” he said. “But we were expecting a quarter- to a half-inch of ice and we got a lot more. We tackle it as hard as possible, but when you get that much in that amount of time, it’s tough.”
For Oncor, the region’s electric provider, the first few days of the storm were spent in a furious effort to restore power.
“At our peak on Friday, we had 270,000 outages,” said spokeswoman Jeamy Molina. “And Saturday and Sunday, we saw an additional 50,000. Our crews were on 16-hour shifts, and we had more than 5,000 Oncor employees, contractors and mutual utility partners from Texas and seven other states working on this.”
The last few hundred properties in the Dallas-Fort Worth area without power had it restored Tuesday, she said, though crews are still working on areas farther north that took a harder hit from the storm.
Numerically, the progress was impressive, restoring more than a quarter-million customers’ power in about five days.
“We know that doesn’t seem fast to customers who had their power out for extended periods,” Molina said. “But we did everything we could and worked round the clock to make sure customers could have power restored as quickly as possible.”
Dallas Area Rapid Transit experienced the largest light-rail shutdown in agency history after the ice kept trains from running for three days. The system reached full service Tuesday afternoon when the last shuttered leg, the Blue Line from Dallas to Rowlett, opened to passengers.
The ice storm has been linked to at least five deaths in Dallas-Fort Worth.
Kayla Alejandra Gawalek, a 21-year-old Lewisville woman, died early Saturday after her pickup slid off an icy bridge on I-35 and into Lewisville Lake. She was on her way to work in Denton.
Crews recovered the truck with Gawalek’s body inside several hours later.
Sergio Diaz Jr., 26, of Rockwall, died in a car crash early Sunday on Royal Lane near Preston Road in Dallas.
A woman in her mid-40s was found dead in a South Dallas parking lot on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard near the S.M. Wright Expessway on Monday, an apparent victim of the freezing weather.
A 91-year-old Fort Worth man, Therman Harris, was found dead early Monday in southwest Fort Worth, near his SUV, about 13 miles from his home. The Tarrant County medical examiner will determine the cause of death.
An Arlington man, 29-year-old Chase Brandenburgh, died Thursday when his car slammed into a tractor-trailer on Interstate 20 in icy conditions on Thursday.
The core of the problems across North Texas was the storm itself. Forecasts Thursday called for a quarter to three-quarters of an inch of ice from bands of freezing rain. Instead, much of the Dallas area awoke to 2, 3 or even 4 inches of sleet, freezing rain and rain that froze solid.
“We were thinking more freezing rain, and it ended up being more sleet than freezing rain,” said Jesse Moore, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Fort Worth.
“It’s really important to know exactly how the atmosphere looks, how deep the cold air will be,” Moore said. “We had surface temperatures at or below freezing, and temperatures in the upper 40s and 50s as you went up into the atmosphere, and then colder temperatures above that.
“That’s what makes winter weather forecasting so much more difficult here — our temperatures are usually borderline,” he said. “We had some freezing rain, and it went back and forth several times, but sleet was the primary precipitation.”
Or as Hartzel put it, “Six inches of snow would have been much easier to handle than six inches of sleet, freezing rain and ice.”
But Tuesday’s sunny skies provided an antidote to all the ice, at least for a while.
“Even when temperatures are 30 to 32, even in the upper 20s, you get melting with sunshine,” said Moore of the National Weather Service. “So we’re seeing melting” even though temperatures remained cooler than expected.
But with sub-freezing temperatures early Wednesday and Thursday, any wet spots on the roads will ice over again, Moore said. Temperatures Friday should remain above freezing, with highs reaching the 50s
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