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Here in southwest Nebraska we had a major ice storm a few days before Christmas. Talk about BEAUTIFUL!

I got some pictures, but only got a bit of the flavor of the beauty of bright sun on that crystal clear ice coating every branch, every wire, every vehicle. It took three days of sunshine with temperatures that reached 40 or higher for it all to melt off. That made a different kind of ice storm – melting chunks falling off trees and wires for three days! Piles of broken ice in every yard and street.

But in central Nebraska the next weekend they got more than we had. My daughter-in-law wrote about their experience being without power for a number of hours, an article available at Nebraska State Paper.

She wrote,

“Broken limbs, like beautiful ice sculptures, lay scattered about. But the thaw has begun to reveal the carnage underneath. The sparkling, crystal-like world seems a contradiction to the true nature of the storm. How can something so beautiful be so destructive?”

Beauty. And destruction.

There is at ExtremeInstability.com (see below) a series of excellent photos taken by a trucker who was moving east through central Nebraska while the ice was building up. (My daughter said it just kept raining and freezing. “How does it DO that?” My son would put salt on his steps, and before long the rain would cover the salt and freeze the porch into a solid sheet again.) Then parts of the state got snow on top of the ice.

We saw impressive ice storms regularly when we lived in Norman, OK, but I don’t think I ever saw it so thick. And we’re not used to it up here. We get rain or snow (if we get anything, which is fairly rare.)

This will take you to that excellent series of quite a few shots taken by that trucker. He went out again a couple of days after the storm; he spent some time on this. It’s hard to get the feel of it with a camera, but he did a pretty good job.

We drove to Grand Island Saturday, then back through Hastings on Sunday (to see friends and family, not ice), and we can vouch for the kind of damage and the fields of ice that he documents.

The trucker wrote under one of his shots,

“Something so beautiful to look at has caused such extensive damage.”

Here’s a small sampling of his work

Ice on a barbed wire strand.

These are metal poles, bent and broken.

Crumpled giants.

Here are a few comments at a blog that has some connection with that extremeinstability site.

And here’s what ExtremeInstability.com is usually about – thunderstorms and tornados.

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