Countywide Preparations Under Way for Forecasted Weekend Ice Storm

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

The winter storm churning across much of the nation is expected to begin bearing down on Anderson County early Saturday afternoon, with current forecasts calling for up to a half-inch of ice and gusty winds and sub-freezing temperatures lingering into midweek.

Ice rather than snow is a distinction between inconvenience and the kind of slow, grinding disaster that can pull down power lines, close roads for days, and turn familiar neighborhoods into a collage of blue emergency lights and darkened living rooms.

On Thursday Anderson County council declared a state of emergency, which, layered atop the governor’s statewide disaster order, was less a piece of theater than a key, unlocking additional funding and the possibility of federal assistance if the ice storm developing on weather maps reached the threshold of a declared disaster.

In a meeting at the historic courthouse with online connections to those who lead first responders, Emergency Management Director Josh Hawkins offered the latest from the National Weather Service that sketched out a storm expected to be neither sudden nor dramatic, but relentless, as he informed and organized those who will be charged with meeting the potential challenges.

Though current projections call for frozen precipitation throughout the weekend, the storm, carrying the curious name of Winter Storm Fern, will not be operating on anyone’s schedule but its own.

The forecast, as Hawkins laid it out, resembled less a single event than a siege. From midday Saturday through sometime Monday, Anderson could expect a persistent mix of rain, sleet, and ice, a kind of weather that does not accumulate in for scenic seasonal postcards but in power outages and downed trees.

“That’s a lot of time to have ice come down and sleet come down,” said Hawkins. “It could potentially be devastating for Anderson and the Upstate.”

One of the small cruelties of ice is that, unlike snow, it does not leave when the sky clears. Hawkins is careful to underline this point for residents already planning their week ahead, already imagining that once the radar clears, the roads and power grid will follow.

“Just because the snow and the sleet and the ice stops on Monday doesn’t mean that this event stops,” said Hawkins. “Potentially, we could see effects of this all the way through Thursday, with Thursday being where temperatures rise up enough to start melting ice.”

In other words, the visible storm may occupy one long weekend, but the invisible one—black ice on back roads, sagging lines in remote corners of the county, secondary limbs finally giving way days after the last frozen raindrop—will linger.  The week ahead looks like a potential slow‑motion test not only of infrastructure but of patience: surfaces refreezing overnight, school decisions made in the gray ambiguity between barely passable and not quite safe.

Sunday’s high hovering around 32 degrees and still raining means that frozen precipitation will fall in a narrow band where liquid becomes weaponized against trees, bridges, and exposed metal.  Monday offers only a marginal reprieve: temperatures around 31 at daybreak, a high of 37, and a wind chill that drags that number back toward a raw, bone‑level cold for anyone without dependable heat.

“Monday, Tuesday, they’re actually calling for heavier winds, too, which is also not a good portion of this,” said Hawkin.  Wind in a landscape already glazed with ice is the unseen hand that shakes loose whatever the storm did not immediately break, the force that could make a quiet Tuesday afternoon more dangerous than a dramatic Saturday night.

Hawkins said that the county is “doing everything we can to prepare for that ahead of time,” a phrase that covers a great deal of unglamorous labor.  Behind it are the logistics of staging equipment, coordinating with utilities, and mapping which communities will be most vulnerable if wind and ice conspire exactly as the models suggest.

If there is a narrative comfort in weather events, it lies in their promise of an ending: the line where the rain moves east, the morning when sunlight finally hits the driveway at the right angle. Hawkins, though, circled back to Thursday, a full four days after the last of the significant precipitation is expected to fall.  Only then, with temperatures rising enough “to start melting ice,” does he hint at something like closure, though it will be a messy, inconvenient sort, full of slush and fallen limbs and the quiet accounting that happens after every storm: how many hours without power, how many calls to emergency services, how many close calls on bridges that looked dry but were not.

In the meantime, hundreds across the county, including EMS, law enforcement, fire departments, roads and bridges workers, dispatch workers, health care workers and others are preparing for the worst while hoping for the best.

Around the table and on the call were representatives from agencies that, have are no stranger to disasters: emergency management, public works, law enforcement, fire, and the political leadership that would ultimately be held responsible for how the storm played out.  They are unified to tackle the prospect of 48 hours of continuous freezing precipitation, followed by days of slow fallout that would test every shared plan and mutual‑aid agreement.

The tools are thoroughly modern—a decision‑support platform the county uses that can zoom in on Anderson County and the towns and cities block by block, offering a time‑stamped projection of when rain would harden into something more dangerous.  Yet the concerns remained stubbornly old‑fashioned: where to anticipate the first outages, which overpasses would turn treacherous first, how best to deploy people and equipment in a county that is, at heart, a patchwork of city streets and rural stretches threaded with power lines and tall trees.

By the time the briefing drilled down into Saturday evening, the numbers felt less like abstract metrics and more like a kind of impending texture: starting with a modest 0.3 inches of snow and 0.02 inches of ice around midday, then building after 7 p.m. into the accumulation that everyone in the room understood as the real story.  Overnight and into the Sunday morning hours, the model showed 0.38 inches of ice, followed by additional layers—0.22 inches, then 0.16 inches—that, added together, justified the understated aside from Hawkins: “If y’all can do the math, that is a lot of ice.”

The agencies in the historic courthouse are not yet dispatching trucks or opening shelters, but they were already living mentally in the hours to come—when those small decimals on the screen could translate into darkened houses, blocked roads, and the long, patient work of putting a winter‑struck county back together.

This story is developing, including details on shelters and contact numbers.

For now, here’s how citizens can begin preparations. Here are two sites offering tips: 1. 2.