Ice is the real threat, not snow
Snow closes school. Ice takes down the power lines, blocks the roads with limbs, and keeps crews from reaching either one for days. Preparing your home for winter storms here means preparing for ice, not for snow depth. A storm that arrives as freezing rain instead of snow is a different kind of event entirely, and the difference can come down to a couple of degrees and a few hundred feet of elevation.
A quarter inch of ice on a limb over a service line is enough to bring both down.
Know which words mean what
Warnings for Hot Springs come from the National Weather Service office in Greenville-Spartanburg, based in Greer, South Carolina, which covers Madison County as forecast zone NCZ048. The terms worth knowing:
- Winter Storm Watch: conditions are favorable for a significant winter storm. Get ready.
- Winter Storm Warning: a significant event including snow, ice, sleet, or blowing snow is happening or about to. Act.
- Winter Weather Advisory: wintry weather is expected but is not forecast to reach warning criteria. Still enough to make the roads bad.
- Ice Storm Warning: around a quarter inch of ice accumulation or more.
- Cold Weather Advisory, Extreme Cold Watch and Extreme Cold Warning: these replaced the older Wind Chill Advisory, Watch and Warning. If you learned these as wind chill products, listen for the new names instead.
Protect the pipes
Frozen pipes do their damage at ordinary houses on ordinary cold nights, which is why they are worth an hour of attention before the first hard freeze. The American Red Cross recommends insulating pipes that run along exterior walls or through unheated crawl spaces and attics, letting cold water drip from faucets fed by exposed pipes, opening kitchen and bathroom cabinet doors so warm air reaches the plumbing, and keeping the thermostat at the same temperature day and night. If you leave town, set it no lower than 55 degrees.
Two things everyone in the house should know before winter: where the main water shutoff is, and how to turn it. If a pipe does freeze, the Red Cross is direct about thawing it. A hair dryer, a heating pad, or towels soaked in hot water are fine. A blowtorch, a propane or kerosene heater, or a charcoal stove is how a frozen pipe becomes a house fire.
Heat safely, especially when the power is out
Most winter storm deaths are indirect. NOAA points to traffic accidents on icy roads, heart attacks while shoveling snow, and hypothermia from prolonged exposure to cold. Carbon monoxide from generators and indoor heating adds to that list every winter, and it is the one that is fully preventable.
- Generators go outside, more than 20 feet from any window, door, or vent. That’s the CDC’s distance, and an open garage door does not count as outside. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is equally direct about never plugging a generator into a wall outlet to power the house wiring, a practice called backfeeding, which can electrocute a line worker down the road.
- Never heat a home with a cooking stove, an oven, a charcoal grill, or a camp stove. All of them produce carbon monoxide indoors.
- Keep anything that can burn at least three feet from a heater. That’s the Red Cross rule, and it applies to space heaters, wood stoves, and fireplaces alike.
- Have working carbon monoxide alarms with battery backup near every sleeping area. Check them in the fall, when you’d change smoke alarm batteries anyway.
- Get the chimney inspected once a year. The Chimney Safety Institute of America cites NFPA 211 on this: chimneys, fireplaces, and vents should be inspected at least annually for soundness, deposits, and clearances. A flue that hasn’t been looked at since the last owner is a real risk if you’re leaning on it for heat.
Preparing your home for winter storms: do this before the first freeze
The CDC’s winter storm guidance is a practical list for an old house in the mountains: insulate water lines on exterior walls, caulk and weatherstrip doors and windows, insulate walls and the attic, repair roof leaks, and cut back tree branches that could fall on the house during a storm. That last one is the item people skip and regret. Limbs over the roof, the driveway, and the service drop are worth a look now, while a ladder is still a reasonable idea.
One more item nobody puts on the list: fill the propane or fuel oil tank before the season rather than during it. A delivery truck cannot reach you on the same road the power crew cannot reach you on. If you heat with wood, lay in more than you think and stack it where you can get to it without going far. And check whether your furnace needs electricity to run its blower, because many do, which means a full tank and no power still adds up to no heat.
When the power stays off
Food is the question that comes up around hour six. Our post on building a two-week food supply has the refrigerator and freezer hours worth memorizing. Keep both doors shut as much as you can stand, and keep an appliance thermometer in the fridge so you’re deciding on a reading rather than a guess.
Pick the one room you would heat, and close the rest of the house off. Heating 200 square feet through a three-day outage is a manageable problem. Heating the whole house is not. Our post on winter power outages walks through how to set that room up.
Then make one phone call. If you know a neighbor who heats with a single source, lives alone, or depends on powered medical equipment, ask now what their plan is for a multi-day outage. That conversation is easier on a mild fall evening than at 11 p.m. during an ice storm. The next post moves to the vehicle, and why four-wheel drive does not help you stop.
Resources mentioned in this post
- National Weather Service, Greenville-Spartanburg forecast office: https://www.weather.gov/gsp/
- Winter weather safety, National Weather Service: https://www.weather.gov/safety/winter
- Winter storm watches, warnings and advisories, National Weather Service: https://www.weather.gov/safety/winter-ww
- National Weather Service, cold weather terminology: https://www.weather.gov/safety/cold-ww
- American Red Cross, Preventing and Thawing Frozen Pipes: https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergencies/types-of-emergencies/winter-storm/frozen-pipes.html
- American Red Cross, Winter Storm Safety: https://www.redcross.org/get-help/how-to-prepare-for-emergencies/types-of-emergencies/winter-storm.html
- CDC, Preparing for a Winter Storm: https://www.cdc.gov/winter-weather/safety/index.html
- CDC, Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Basics: https://www.cdc.gov/carbon-monoxide/about/index.html
- U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, Portable Generator Safety Alert: https://www.cpsc.gov/s3fs-public/5123_SafetyAlert_PortableGenerators_102021.pdf
- Chimney Safety Institute of America, homeowner resources: https://www.csia.org/homeowner-resources
- FoodSafety.gov, Food Safety During a Power Outage: https://www.foodsafety.gov/food-safety-charts/food-safety-during-power-outage
- Ready NC, Winter Weather, North Carolina Emergency Management: https://www.readync.gov/winter-weather