Winter Storm Shocks, Awes Greensboro, North Carolina

Greensboro, North Carolina -- Heavy rains throughout the night on Saturday turned to freezing rain Sunday morning in Greensboro, North Carolina, coating trees and power lines in up to a half an inch of ice.

Traveling one of the main thoroughfares in Greensboro found power outages resulting from downed trees and power lines creating traffic problems as traffic lights at busy intersections were no longer working. Many large shopping centers sat with darkened interiors and potential customers waiting outside.

Arriving home after attending church services, I observed large, ice-coated tree limbs blocking several neighborhood streets and soon found as a result of falling trees and limbs the power off in my neighborhood. But fortunately, power was restored before the temperature inside our house equaled that of the temperature outside, a chilling 32 degrees.

With freezing rain and ice accumulation continuing throughout the day on Sunday, Duke Power reported 250,317 homes without power. By noon on Monday this number was reported to be 169,000.

The freezing rain had turned to wind driven snow at 8 p.m. and quickly accumulated on ground and road surfaces. Television announcements told of school and business closing scheduled for Monday and officials encouraged residents not to travel unless absolutely necessary.

By 10 p.m., local news was reporting of multiple automobile accidents, most of which consisted of cars in roadside ditches or minor fender benders as cars failing to maintain a safe distance rammed into the rear of a stopped vehicle. On the 11 p.m. local news, there were no reports of serious injuries resulting from traffic accidents.

At 1:15 a.m. on Monday, with snow still falling, I was awakened by a tremendous flash of light followed by loud explosion that rocked my house. This was followed by four additional explosions of light and loud booms. With each explosion, the entire neighborhood was illuminated as if someone had turned on a huge spotlight. It was an eerie feeling and quite honestly brought back memories of the "shock and awe," attack which began the Iraq war.

Following the last explosion emergency response vehicles with sirens blasting responded to the explosion site, which from my vantage point appeared to be at the huge Southern Foods processing plant.

News reports this morning revealed that the explosions were the result of multiple large transformers exploding as a result of trees falling on power lines and creating a "domino effect" as power surges traveled from one transformer to the next. Fortunately, there no injuries or significant damage to the site.

Weather reports this morning indicated 6.5 inches of snow in Greensboro, much of it on top of a layer of ice.

8 a.m. brought the sounds of several dozen happily laughing and periodically screaming neighborhood children as they sled down a nearby hillside of a local playground. The sledding was interrupted only by randomly occurring snowball battles, but all in good fun. After all, school was out.

As a result of school and business closings there no reports of serious injuries.