Weather strangeness continues

The roller coaster ride continues ...

After the record-breaking lows of early last week and the rather warm days that followed, this week saw freezing rain and icing of existing snowfall that made travel nearly impossible and caused unprecedented continuation of school closings. (See page 3 for a letter from the Muskegon public school superintendents.)

It was rather pretty (see below, taken in downtown Grand Rapids Wednesday), but the worst result has been a rash of power outages – Muskegon was not as hard-hit as Kent County, but there are still some without power as of late Thursday. Moreover, Consumers Energy was saying that they are not sure when restoration can be accomplished.

In fact, the weather in some areas of the state may mean even more outages.

Mutual assistance crews from other states have arrived (53 crews of them) and 179 more crews were on their way Thursday.

In the meantime, those without power are urged to call 2-1-1 if they have emergency needs for shelter or if they need oxygen to survive.

To check on outages and restoration times, visit www.ConsumersEnergy.com/OutageCenter.