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Why freezing rain may be a lot extra harmful than snow
Freezing rain may cause ice to build up on tree branches and energy traces and thus poses a larger threat than snow
Ice hangs from energy traces throughout a winter storm in Brentwood, Tenn., on January 25, 2026. A state of emergency is in place to assist cope with energy outages, ice, and freezing temperatures.
Camden Corridor/NurPhoto by way of Getty Pictures
This previous weekend’s winter storm blanketed big swaths of the nation in snow, with as much as two ft falling in some areas. However the widespread energy outages that got here with the storm—an estimated a million individuals from Texas to Kentucky had misplaced energy by Sunday afternoon—had much less to do with the snow and way more to do with the 0.5 to 1 inch of ice that constructed up because of freezing rain.
Right here’s why freezing rain can find yourself being a lot extra damaging to infrastructure than snow.
First, it helps to know what freezing rain is. In a winter storm, the temperature at totally different layers of the ambiance determines what sort of precipitation falls. When the ambiance is under freezing from the floor upward, snow falls. But when there’s a layer of heat air between larger ranges of the ambiance and the floor (what known as a temperature inversion), that snow melts into rain. And if there’s a deep sufficient layer of freezing air under the inversion, the falling rain refreezes into onerous pellets of ice known as sleet. If it’s not deep sufficient, nonetheless, the rain stays liquid however freezes on contact with chilly surfaces, particularly uncovered ones, reminiscent of bridges, tree branches—and energy traces.
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For a big a part of the southern U.S., the latter state of affairs is precisely what got here to go with this storm, as heat, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico was pulled into the climate system, melting the snow and turning it into freezing rain that hardened into ice on the bottom.
The rationale that ice may cause energy outages is, basically, that “the freezing rain sticks and the snow doesn’t,” says Seth Guikema, a civil and environmental engineer on the College of Michigan. Although a small layer of snow can gather on high of some surfaces, wind will typically blow it off. In the meantime ice can accrete on each the highest and underside of branches and energy traces. That ice exerts huge weight—ice can add 500 kilos of weight to energy traces, in accordance with the Air Drive Security Middle.
Energy outages happen when ice breaks energy traces or different infrastructure, however they primarily occur when ice breaks tree limbs that then take out the facility traces. The place energy traces are aboveground quite than buried underground, there’s typically extra harm, and that may have socioeconomic implications. Analysis exhibits that underground traces are extra prevalent in areas the place there are “greater, higher-value and newer properties,” Guikema says. Folks in poorer areas who’re subjected to extra outages are additionally much less more likely to have their very own electrical turbines as a backup, he provides. “There’s an actual disparity in how individuals can cope with this,” Guikema says.
The areas affected by this previous weekend’s storm additionally underscored its impact. “Take into account that many of the areas impacted by this ice are rural in nature so it is a fairly unimaginable variety of outages, and as you’ll be able to see many counties and parishes within the impacted space have greater than half of their populace with out energy,” wrote Alan Gerard, a meteorologist and CEO of Balanced Climate, in a weblog publish on Sunday.
How lengthy the outages final will rely on a number of elements, together with how widespread they’re, what the diploma of harm is and how briskly crews can entry websites in want of restore. Outages can last more in winter than they do after summer time thunderstorms as a result of crews must cope with icy roads and snow, and the harm to the facility system may be worse, even requiring rebuilding, Guikema says. “There’s simply a lot of it that it’s going to take time,” he says.
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