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Ice Storm Not Quite as Severe as Predicted, BREMCO Responds to 70-plus Outages in Coverage Area

By Jesse Wood

Dec. 9, 2013. The talk of the town seemed to be the looming ice storm heading into the weekend, and Blue Ridge Electric Membership Corp. was on high alert, preparing for a storm that was forecasted to possibly bring up to a half an inch of ice in the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

But as BREMCO posted on its Facebook page, “Weather was not quite as severe as predicted, but the ice did cause a few problems overnight.” Late Sunday, the National Weather Service sent out an update, noting ice reports across the region that had more accumulation outside of North Carolina. See image to the right.

Source: National Weather Service
Source: National Weather Service

While accumulation of ice was reported across Southern Appalachia on a chilly Sunday evening, temperatures then increased by double digits, landing in the high 40s and low 50s in much of the High Country by Monday morning.

The ice that did accumulate in the region caused trees to fall on some power lines across the BREMCO coverage area, leaving a tiny percentage of BREMCO’s 74,000 members without power in the middle of the night. 

At about 7:30 a.m. this morning, BREMCO noted that 22 members in Watauga, 46 members in Sparta and 6 members in Ashe County were affected with outages caused by fallen trees in the middle of the night. Linemen were working to restore power to five of the six members in Ashe County early this morning.

At about 9 a.m., no outages existed on the BREMCO outage map