St. Louis was hit with a major ice storm last night. It left half an inch to an inch of ice on everything, ground, trees, wires, etc. Then it snowed a good 6 or more inches on top of that.

We lost power at around midnight last night, a transformer exploded not too far away. We got power back a little after 7 p.m. today, but I'm not trusting it to hold all night (although I'm crossing my fingers a lot).

After a feeble attempt to keep the bird warm with the gas fireplace (John didn't go to work because no one answered there), we moved him twice to locations that had heat, and now he's in the second one for the evening. That helped me focus on the crisis of keeping pipes from freezing, handling anything mom and dad needed, etc.

It's supposed to get down to 11-12 degrees tonight, and even though our power came back on, there are still over 300,000 people without power. It had been half a million, so they are making progress...however the whole mess will refreeze overnight and they expect more transformers to blow and more trees to come down.

That's twice this year our city has made the news on CNN.... it'd be nice to find a better way to do it.

Anyway, I'm requesting prayers for all the people stuck without power tonight in this frigid weather(including my mom and dad who won't go somewhere warm no matter how hard we tried), and also for those who have it (including us now) to keep it and not lose it again tonight.

And I have a dumb question, but don't know what I'd google to search out the answer. Why would ice on a transformer make it explode?

Thanks,

Brenda

(Slowly thawing out in St. Louis)