4.Pantagraph.com News

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

Lights slowly come back on after storm

By Murray Evans

In Oklahoma City, lights came back on for some lucky people as utility crews panic and struggle to repair power lines effected by the ice storm. The blackout effected millions of people across the "nations mid-section". There are tree limbs and fallen down trees everywhere, in roads, on houses just everywhere. Ice up to 1 1/2 inches thick has glazed much of the central Plains and Midwest this week. There has been 27 deaths reported due to the storm so far. The storm developed last week and since then "about 468,000 homes and business still had no power Wednesday in Oklahoma, suffering its worst power outage on record." Other areas around Oklahoma were affected as well and some are still out of power. Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma officials have declared a state of emergency.

This is another terrible, natural disaster and people need to bind together to help out the ones in need. People have had to pack up there belongings and move into shelters for the time being. It seems that a huge chunk of the United States has had some pretty horrific storms lately including the one in Washington, which caused that devastating flood. I do believe that these weird weather patterns and worsening storm in the last few years does have to do with global warming, which is a whole other issue I will not get into right now. In Vancouver last year, we had some wind storms which I thought were terrible because we don't really get that very often, but they were nothing compared to the severity of storms that other regions are getting. I couldn't imagine being in a storm like those, I was so scared when we had our own little storms. I can only hope that the worst is over for them because they are expecting another storm this Friday. I hope utility crews can get the power up and running for everyone and hope that no one else loses their life due to these storms.