Chesterton Tribune

 

 

More snow courtesy of the forever winter

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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.

Storm causes scattered outages in northern Indiana

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.

 

Posted 3/12/2014

 
 

 

 

 

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