By KEVIN NEVERS
Not much to say
about it.
Second week in
March: another snowstorm, another day of school canceled.
Four inches? Five
inches? Hard to say, with all the blowing. Not normally enough to force
Duneland Schools to stay shuttered, except that the snow began falling late,
around 3 a.m., and when it came, it came hard.
Both the Chesterton
Street Department and the Porter Public Works Department reported white-out
conditions between 3 and 5:30 a.m., forcing plow drivers to go slow--“very,
very slow,” Porter Public Works Director
Brenda Brueckheimer said--and to stick mostly to the main roads.
The snow was also
heavy--“like cement,” Brueckheimer noted, “heavy,
heavy snow, with all the rain we had first.”
In Chesterton
Street Department Foreman Keith Park was reporting the main roads to be in
“good” shape and salted, around 8 a.m. Not all side-streets had been plowed,
however.
In Porter the plows
were hitting side streets and subdivisions late this morning.
There was one
wrinkle in today’s winter event: it played havoc with NIPSCO’s electric
system, heavy snow weighting tree branches whipped by high winds and hitting
wires. At 11 a.m. 25,847 customers were without power across NIPSCO’s
service territory, most of them in Lake County and elsewhere.
In Chesterton a
handful of customers were without power, one of them being the Chesterton
Tribune, which until 10:45 a.m. or so was making do with a single
circuit.
At 5:14 a.m. the
Chesterton Fire Department responded to a report of lines arcing in an alley
at Ninth Street and West Porter Ave., caused by limbs weighted by snow
striking the wires.
In Portage 193
customers were without power at 11 a.m.; in Valparaiso, 2,413.
FORT WAYNE, Ind.
(AP) — The heavy snowfall in northern Indiana has caused numerous power
outages scattered across in the area.
Major utilities
report about 30,000 homes and businesses were without electricity late
Wednesday morning throughout the state's northern tier from the Gary area
across to Fort Wayne.
Indiana Michigan
Power says it has about 8,000 outages in Allen County, which includes Fort
Wayne. Northern Indiana Public Service Co. has several thousand outages in
northwestern Indiana's Lake and Porter counties, along with many in
largely rural areas southeast of South Bend.
The National
Weather Service office says up to 6 inches of snow fell by late morning in
some parts of northern Indiana.
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Posted 3/12/2014