Real winter weather in central Texas rarely starts around the nominal start of the season (which officially begins here in Austin at 3:48 PM tomorrow (December 21st)), but this year an arctic blast is barrelling down on us Thursday.
The Arctic air is forecast to arrive Thursday morning into the afternoon. Temperatures will drop sharply — possibly by as much as 40° in just two hours behind the frontal passage. By Thursday evening, temperatures drop below freezing then plunge into the single-digits and teens Friday morning.
I’m not yet seeing single digit forecasts on my phone app yet, but 14°F is damn cold enough.
Wind gusts of 30-40 mph Thursday night through Friday morning are likely to drop wind chills below zero in some areas — capable of causing frostbite in 30-45 minutes and likely prompting our second-ever Wind Chill Warning. The first of these warnings was issued in Feb. 2021.
With three consecutive hard freezes in our forecast Friday morning through Christmas morning, it is imperative you take steps to protect your pets, pipes, plants and people. Temperatures finally start to warm Christmas Day and the following day.
Follow the below tips from Austin Water to protect your home’s plumbing:
- Protect Indoor Faucets. Open cabinets beneath kitchen and bathroom sinks to allow warmer air to circulate around pipes. Be sure to remove any toxic substances located in these cabinets if there are children or pets living in the residence.
- Drip Only if Needed. After the measures above are taken, drip one cold-water faucet slowly if you feel your pipes may still freeze. The faucet you choose should be the one that is the greatest distance from your main shutoff valve. It does not need to be a running trickle. If you do drip your faucet, capture the water for future use.
- Power Outages. If you experience a power outage for more than 24 hours, stop dripping your faucets and turn off your water at the meter.
Because we’re not expected to get snow and ice, hopefully we can avoid widespread power outages this time, but if not, here’s the Austin power outage map.
With cold weather due Thursday, there’s still time to get in an Amazon order to prepare. So here (again) are a few cold weather prep items you might find useful:
Faucet Covers. If you’re a homeowner, you probably already have those, but if not, here they are, and they seem to work better than a rag or dripping the faucet, and neither of my faucets busted in the ice storm. That link goes to the cheap Styrofoam version, but these plastic ones look a bit bigger and stronger.
O’Keeffe’s Working Hands cream: I walk my dogs 2-3 times a day pretty much every single day of the year, and I found my hands getting cracked and raw in the cold, even through gloves. O’Keeffe’s Working Hands fixed the problem. I frequently give this stuff out as Christmas gifts.
Carmex lip balm. A small, cheap jar that solves the chapped lips problem in winter. I know some people prefer Chapstick, but to me the main result of using Chapstick is that 30 minutes later you fell a need to use more Chapstick.
Kerasal Intensive Foot Repair for cracked and painful feet. More info here. Podiatrist recommended!
De-icing spray. You can stand there for 15 minutes ineffectually scraping your frozen windows like William H. Macy in Fargo, or you can keep a bottle of this in your trunk.
Water leak detector: A lot of people don’t have these, but I consider them essential basic gear, as they can save you hundreds or thousands of dollars in water damage. Usual made in China caveats apply, but it’s very simple tech (two parallel wires on the exterior that water closes the circuit and sets off when wet). That link goes to a 5-pack, because I recommend putting one behind every toilet, under every sink you use, under your water heater, and next to your washing machine (I’ve had mine start rocking for an unbalanced load that pulled the drain hose loose). (There’s an even cheaper five pack from another manufacturer (also made in China) that I have no experience with.)
Flashlights. I have an old bulb-type Maglite, but here’s a pretty close equivalent with LEDs. As a bonus, it’s also heavy enough to conk someone out. I have flashlights in my bedroom, my kitchen and in my car’s glovebox. The highest rated flashlight on Amazon is the Streamlight 75458 Stinger DS, which is about four times as expensive as the Maglite. I assume it’s brighter and with a longer life, and maybe you have a use case that justifies the cost. And if you have flashlights, chances are you’ll also need…
Batteries. The Maglite takes D-Cells, and you’re going to want, at a minimum, enough to reload every flashlight twice, which should be enough to get you through a couple of evenings of power outages. Check your flashlights every six months when you check your smoke and CO detectors. Speaking of which, those and the water leak detectors take 9 volt batteries, and you want enough around to be able to change out every battery in your detectors as needed. Those links go to Duracells, which I’ve been pretty happy with. Sam’s and Lowes frequently have cheaper bulk deals, so check there if you’re out and about.
Gas And Water Emergency Shut Off Tool. The Orbit 26097 provides a water shutoff valve, a gas shutoff valve, manhole cover lift tool, and a rubberized grip. You need one of these for the same reason you need a water leak detector, i.e. it will greatly limit damage before the plumber gets there. One caveat: I used one last week to cut off the water in advance of a new washer being installed (just in case the ancient water valves in the laundry room started leaking) and the manhole cover part of the tool broke off when I was moving the manhole back into place. The rest is still good, but quality metal shouldn’t snap like that. I’ll have to dig out the warranty info for a replacement.
Sawyer Products Water Filtration System: If you’ve ever been under a water boil notice, the Sawyer system is Good Enough to get you through, even if it is a slight pain to fill and squeeze the bag enough times for my dogs and I to drink (but still less of a pain that boiling water and waiting for it to cool).
Duct tape is useful to have year-round, but especially during an emergency, to patch a small leak or keep something together until the emergency is over and you can replace it. Link goes to 3M all-weather duct tape, which is better than the generic stuff for outside tasks, like sealing around the edge of a faucet cover.
Stay warm…
Tags: Austin, prepper, Texas, weather
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 20th, 2022 at 12:56 PM and is filed under Austin, Texas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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1) You might want to run your water taps in any event, just to help prevent the pipes from freezing elsewhere. I don’t do that in my neck of the woods (MA) unless it’s going to be single digits for 2+ days.
2) Something my roommate stumbled on earlier this year – emergency lightbulbs. A company called Boundery has a product called EBulb, which is basically a lightbulb with a small lithium ion battery. It works like a normal bulb but it has a sensor that detects when the electricity’s out, and I had a bulb last over 3 hours when power went out in my town a few weeks ago, so now I have two of them. Makes the mad scramble for candles a lot more manageable or even eliminates it.
I bought an extra propane tank for my camp stove and a hand-crank coffee bean grinder. Two 50-liter jerry cans of water for coffee. I have priorities.
Zero degree sleeping bags are ready in the event of an electric outage. Sufficient batteries on hand and recharger pack for the cell phones are charged and ready. Sufficient food and ammunition on-hand for most challenges.
Twenty years with the Boy Scouts and Venturing Program have left me with quite a collection of disaster gear.
Y’know… I think a lot of folks got spoiled during the recent Climatic Optimum.
People really ought to read their histories, with an eye towards what the actual conditions were, back in the day. I remember reading accounts in first-person historical documents about how deeply cold places like Texas got in the 1800s.
I also remember being stationed in Oklahoma the winter of 1983-84, when it got so miserably cold that it froze out almost all the pipes in a lot of Lawton because they weren’t buried below the frost line. We were using our trailer-mounted electric welder to go out and thaw pipes, it was so bad. We also had to actually shut down barracks because heating systems weren’t adequate.
So, to be blunt? All the waily-waily-woe about climate change and how all this is “unprecedented”? Yeah; not so damn much. There are precedents for all this kind of weather, and people going all “OMG!!! We’ve never had anything like this, we’re unprepared…” is mostly fatuous bullshit. You did have it before; it has done this before, and yes, you forgot while the fat times rolled. Welcome back to reality.
Gonna be a bunch of long, cold winters ahead, for a lot of people who elected the idiots we have in office. It was good times when you elected them, you got lazy, now you’re gonna pay.
Cracks me up. I was literally just talking about this shit to one of the dumbasses working our state government up here. He actually told me that they’d been cutting the budget on winter road maintenance and projecting it eventually going to zero, ‘cos “Climate’s changing…”. I was like “Oh? Raaaally? You looked outside, lately?”
I’d laugh, but I have to go shovel off the neighbor’s roof.
Ducking morons. Climate is cyclic, and you let yourselves get conned because it was on the warm part of the curve. Guess what? You’re gonna pay for all that stupidity and overconfidence while we go whizzing down the cold half.
Kirk
In 87 in Denver it hit and froze a pipe in the VAMC Hospital – flooded the basement, had to evac the hospital – over 200 patients to other facilities. A mess. All the newbies shocked – all of us locals not surprised.
The thing that just irritates the ever-loving snot out of me is hearing all these people whose perspective is limited to the ten or so years they’ve lived in the area around me complain that the “climate is changing”, when the actual reality is that they moved up here into the mountains when the cycle was on the warm end of things, and never experienced the cold we got during the cold part.
I was literally sitting on the couch at an acquaintance’s place, while listening to them pronounce the climate wisdom upon me about how things were changing. On the coffee table? A book of local historical photos, going back to the early days of settlement. She’s doing the waily-waily about evil man killing Gaia, and how the current cold snap is directly related. I just turn to the section of the book showing pictures of our little town’s business district buried in snow back during the 1890s, to the point where they were tunneling between the buildings and the drifts were fifteen feet up the sides of houses. The amount of cognitive dissonance I created with that act was… Immense.
Then, there was the minor fact that we’d once hosted the national ski-jump championships, within eye-shot of the center of town, at the local ski hill. That was the 1930s, and the intervening years between then and the early 1890s had seen some very warm winters without snow, either.
What most of these idiots lack is perspective. Everyone moves around, these days, and so they wander into a new area to live, and it’s all new to them: They are convinced that what they’ve encountered in their limited time around the area is the norm, and it simply isn’t. The really amazing thing to me is that so few of these morons who’re in charge of things have bothered to ever do the historical research to see if their theories are correct, or even consider that perhaps there are cycles to this crap that we’re only seeing a narrow time-slice of.
I hate to tell all the Gaia believers this, but humanity isn’t much more than a pimple on the face of the planet. They like to puff themselves up as this great big threat, ‘cos that’s how they roll, but the reality is? Give it a couple of generations after we’re all gone, and it’ll be mostly back to the way it was before we showed up. Give it a geologic age or two, and you’ll have to do some deep, deep paleontology to even figure out we were ever here.
Get over yourselves, humanity. You’re really not all that big a deal.
Amen, Kirk. I live in the Great State of Texas now, but I was raised in northwestern Illinois, and in my youth (late 50’s to early 70’s) it was routine for us to see ten to twenty days every January-February when the daytime highs never got above zero degrees F. Nighttime lows went well into double digits below zero. If you parked your vehicle outside and didn’t use some sort of warming device to keep your engine block from freezing, you could pretty much say goodbye to that vehicle. In recent years, being only a couple of hours’ drive from the Chicago area, that town has experienced the exact same sort of invasion by the Gaia-worshippers as you described, and they act in exactly the same way now, writing letters to the local papers demanding all the by-now-familiar “green energy” idiocy and helping to elect morons like Jabba the Hutt Pritzker to complete the ruination of my old home state. Last time I checked this morning, they were looking at a subzero high temp today and tomorrow. And the Gaia types, unable to separate themselves from their religious beliefs, will swear with a straight face that it’s all because of “global warming.”
Faucet covers: here in the Chicago area we use outdoor faucets whose actual valve body is a foot inside the house. They never freeze, but be sure to disconnect the hose before a.freeze.