Cold fronts always seem colder when it’s been unusually warm. While that is true this week, as we get through a pretty sharp temperature drop, it was much more true four years ago, during the great freeze in February 2021. It was nearly 80 degrees on the 8th of February, dropping off to a high in the low 40s the next day. I remember it was sort of eerie how that front came in, a strange feeling when out of nowhere freezing fog (something I’d never heard of), started forming on the trees. In the days before weather forecasts, maybe someone would have felt that was a bad sign of things to come. I write a lot of things down, so looking back I find I recorded several things that happened during that extreme cold snap.
The freezing fog started on the 9th, by the 15th, after days of colder and colder weather, I made a note that it was 2 degrees out. I was waiting until it got to 3 before venturing outside. By the 16th, things began to get actually scary as days of severe cold in Texas started to destabilize the power grid. My note later on that same day said,. “The City of Coleman is a total wreck. No power for 36+ hours. No water in most of it. Many phones are down. We had to evacuate David’s parents who were freezing with no heat and no way to cook.” By February 21, the National Guard was flying water into Santa Anna because of the extensive power outages that prevented the water tanks from filling (by the way, for all the preppers out there, I also made a note that it takes about 2 days to run out of stored water in the tanks once the power is off). Sadly, two elderly people died from weather related exposure in Coleman, due to an extended power outage. It was caused, I believe, by a rolling blackout that for some reason failed to roll back on in Coleman.
While that was the worst cold weather I have seen in Texas, The Snow King Blizzard, as they call it, of February 1899 paralyzed the entire south, Texas included. I’m sure people who lived through it never forgot it. One old timer, identified as a Mr. Sackett in the Coleman Democrat-Voice describing an extreme temperature drop out here in the 1890s.Sackett said the Brownwood newspaper described a blizzard that hit Brownwood and then Coleman. “… and the temperature went to 10 degrees below zero twenty-four hours before the same norther struck Coleman. The blizzard, Mr. Sackett says, arrived in Coleman Saturday about noon. The writer does not vouch for the authenticity of the story and is not open for a discussion with the man what can tell a bigger one.”
I’m not sure that Sackett was exaggerating. He did not name the exact date of the storm, but there were two notable storms within range of his anecdote, the 1899 storm and the storm of 1885. The coldest temperatures seem to have come with the 1899 storm when it was 8 degrees below zero in Dallas, 16 below in Amarillo and 8 degrees in Galveston. I can’t find any temperature readings for our area in that storm, but it makes sense given the surrounding readings that Brownwood might well have had a temperature of -10. The storm was nationwide. Reports were made of ice floes emptying into the Gulf from the Mississippi, and Florida had a record low of -2 degrees.
Texas in February seems to enjoy this type of yo-yo living. It was nearly 90 degrees last week, which I think is why this storm feels colder than usual. They say your blood thickens with colder weather, but there’s not a lot of time to adjust between summer like temperatures and a low in the single digits with a 40 mile an hour wind. Hard to believe, but true, it will be almost 80 again by next week!
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Diane Adams is a local journalist whose columns appear Thursdays on BrownwoodNews.com. Comments regarding her columns can be emailed to [email protected].
