Freeze adds complications for farmers and livestock
RIPON, WIS. » On the coldest day in two decades on his fifth-generation dairy farm, Chris Pollack grabbed a thick, black hose from the barn and ventured into the subzero cold, where his beef cattle were chomping cud and waiting for water.
The power had briefly gone out the previous morning, long enough to freeze the line that automatically fills the animals’ heated water trough. Pollack was here to replace it.
“Are you serious?” Pollack said, peering inside the hose. “There’s water frozen in the end already.”
He lifted it up to a small space heater and waited for it to thaw. Such is life in the Deep Freeze of 2019. The past 48 hours in the American Midwest have been about endurance, as a breathtaking cold settled in over a massive stretch of the country. The record-setting frigid temperatures — some of the coldest on the planet Thursday — have frozen the Great Lakes, taxed electrical and naturalgas infrastructure, endangered livestock and tested the mettle of millions who are used to the cold but had never experienced anything like this.
In some areas Thursday, temperatures dropped below minus-50 degrees, and the extreme weather was blamed for several deaths across the region, including people who appear to have frozen to death in Milwaukee, Detroit and Rochester, Minnesota.
From Minnesota to New York, the po- lar vortex again prompted school closures, mail service interruptions and thousands of flight cancellations, many of them in and out of Chicago, which appeared otherworldly in a coating of frost and ice. Eighteen factories run by General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and Ford shut down Thursday because of the brutal weather and a fire at a natural gas compressor station.
Governors declared statewide emergencies, and government offices temporarily shuttered.
More than 680 temperature records were broken or tied this week, according to the Midwestern Regional Climate Center.
In Mount Carroll, Illinois, a trained weather observer reported that temperatures plunged to minus-38 degrees Thursday morning, according to the National Weather Service.
If certified, it would be the state’s lowest temperature on record, supplanting a minus-36 degree day in Congerville on Jan. 5, 1999. In northeast Minnesota, the unincorporated community of Cotton sank to minus-56 degrees — four degrees shy of that state’s coldest temperature.
Tom Skilling, a longtime meteorologist at Chicago’s WGN-TV, said that describing the weather as brutal is an understatement.
“Lake Michigan took on the appearance of a boiling cauldron as air of minus-20 degrees and colder made contact with water sitting just above the freezing level,” Skilling said in his report. “I’ve lived here 40 years and never until today have ever seen a more spectacular display of ‘sea smoke.’ ”