Heavy rain puts western UP on ice

By ZACHARY MARANO

zmarano@yourdailyglobe.com

The western Upper Peninsula and northern Wisconsin received heavy precipitation this past weekend, resulting in many thick layers of ice. Barry Bolich, manager of the Gogebic County Road Commission, said this was the worst ice that the county’s roads have seen in several years.

“As the weather dictated, we called guys on early Saturday morning and immediately applied salt and/or sand where necessary and came back and scraped and plowed again,” Bolich said.

Bolich said that road crews applied sand and salt to the roads three times on Saturday and Sunday. At one point, three of the road commission’s plow trucks were disabled due to the weather conditions, but Bolich said that the road crews came together and were able to make the roads manageable for drivers.

The Iron County Highway Department in Wisconsin could not be reached for comment.

Chris Ouellette, senior media relations representative for Xcel Energy for Wisconsin and Michigan, said Ironwood and Bessemer were two areas that were heavily impacted by the weather. Some power lines went down due to ice and wind and 1,016 Xcel Energy customers lost power.

Ouellette said that the power outages lasted from 12:22 a.m. on Sunday until about 2 p.m., so these people were without power for about 14 hours.

Jordan Wendt, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Marquette, said that the technical term for this weather event is a “TROWAL,” which stands for “trough of warm air aloft.”

“It was a surface flow that originated from the plains and lifted northeast to upper Michigan,” Wendt explained. “It grabbed warm air from the southern plains and Gulf of Mexico and pulled it northward with it. … We had an area of warmer air loft where the snow falls through, it melts. The temperature below the warm air loft is above freezing, so when it hits the ground, it freezes.”

The National Weather Service observer at the Gogebic-Iron Wastewater Treatment Facility in Ironwood reported 4.6 inches of snow in the 72-hour period ending 7 a.m. Monday. When the snow and whatever iced formed from the precipitation was melted down, it measure 1.22 inches of precipitation for the same period.