It's cold, y'all. Seriously cold. The kind of cold people this far south are ill-prepared for.
Tonight the temperature is expected to drop to 16°F, with wind chills of around 0°. The wind outside is gusting up to 30mph. Tomorrow the high temperature won't even get up to the freezing point, and tomorrow night is expected to be a repeat of tonight.
Temporary warming shelters have opened all over the place to accommodate the homeless and those with homes without adequate heat. The schools are opening on a two hour delay, both to conserve energy during the coldest part of the morning and to help students without heavy enough winter clothing. The local animal shelters have been pleading on Facebook for donations for fuel to run space heaters in the unheated kennels (thankfully they were inundated with cash immediately) and the power company is requesting that everyone try to conserve energy as much as possible to ease the burden on the over stressed power grid. Power outages would be terrible at a time like this.
It may seem silly, all this worry over cold temperatures, but it really is a bit of an emergency in poor areas that rarely get so cold. I hope everyone in need of a warm bed found one tonight.
And to think that just last week it reached 70°F a couple of times!
It's madly cold here, too. We're expecting -5 today. I dearly hope there are no power outages - they'd be highly dangerous for any sick or elderly in the area.
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