One note I haven't seen mentioned here yet, we got a lot of rain last week prior to this storm.

Here in Alabama we got around 4.5" in my part of the state, that's nearly our average for an entire month. The ground was already very soft before this storm, making trees more susceptible to high winds. We also had a lot of lightning here last night.

I'm actually surprised I didn't lose power. I'm in a fairly rural area with mostly above ground power lines and lots of trees within falling distance of power poles and lines.

I'm in Georgia. There was a bad thunderstorm front that came through last night and briefly took out the power to my building. High winds and tornado watches across much of the state. We really need to bury our power lines.

It's very typical of this season as we experience several rounds of rapid temperature fluctuations between the 60s and 70s and the 20s and 30s. Late winter and early spring typically bring storms and tornadoes to our region.

It's funny to see everyone rush outside donning springtime apparel and then be hit with the coldest days of the season just after. And it happens every year. "Fake spring", we call it.

We've got a forecast for snow this upcoming Wednesday too! Fingers crossed.

Can't speak for the entire country, but rural Virginia had a nasty ice storm pass through earlier this week [1]. I lost power for about 40 hours.

[1]: https://www.wdbj7.com/2025/02/12/36k-plus-virginians-lose-po...

Like the other Georgia commenters, had a severe storm starting at 4AM trailing off at 6 and ending at 7. We lost power for about 20 minutes, all my essential gear stayed up on battery power. I’m on underground power but we have trees down in Atlanta and a lot of people lost power for a few hours.

What’s amusing is this is all on the heels of another discussion about electrical grids in the US vs Europe and a lot of points made are exactly what we experienced. Our grid can be technically as competent as anywhere but a giant storm sending a tree through a transformer or distribution line is going to make for a bad day.

Severe thunderstorms this morning

https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2025/02/16/live-updates-tor...

South of Atlanta we had a tornado warning around 5am. Several downed trees and power outages but I haven't heard of any actual tornadoes that touched down in my area yet.

Not too bad, but here in Memphis most power lines are old and above ground, so any moderate system coming through will knock out a significant chunk of the grid.

Airplanes keep falling out of the sky and infrastructure keeps failing as Trump fires more and more FAA, DOE, and FEMA employees, and hands the reigns of government over to Musk and Putin.

But just wait until Trump pardons Jeffrey Skilling, and puts him in charge of the Department of Energy Office of Electricity, to overhaul grid modernization, cybersecurity, and resilience running the national power grid, the Energy Information Administration, to provide power grid data and analysis, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to regulate interstate electricity transmission, wholesale power markets, and reliability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Skilling