Another day of closures due to US storm

Four days after a debilitating ice storm, a whole lot of Dallas looks just as it did Friday: frigid, hunkered down, and, in many cases, closed for business.

As of Sunday night, about 20,000 Oncor customers were still without power as temperatures headed toward an expected low of 26 on Monday. The city was keeping its emergency shelter open for another night, and across the region schools and government offices had announced they’d be closed another day.

At least three deaths had been linked to the storm since Saturday, authorities said, including Marija Guimbellot, 75, who slipped on the ice in her front yard Saturday near Dallas Love Field. In North Dallas, Sergio Diaz Jr., 26, was killed when his car crashed early Sunday on Royal Lane near Preston Road.

Police said a woman in her mid-40s who was found dead in a South Dallas parking lot on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard near S.M. Wright Freeway is also believed to have been a victim of the storm.

Thousands of workers had been hard at it around the clock the whole weekend to get the city back on its feet Monday – with mixed results.

“When Mother Nature drops a hockey rink on your airport, there’s only so much you can do,” said David Magaٌa, a spokesman for the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, in a statement that had to have resonated with officials throughout the region.

Still, though Dallas is in for another cold day of dicey traffic and spotty services, Sunday’s efforts weren’t for nothing.

A brief afternoon warming spell brought temperatures above freezing for the first time since last week, if just barely. That was enough for D/FW to open new runways and start flying home some of the thousands of people who camped out overnight Friday and Saturday.

The warming didn’t last long, as it got cold again Sunday night. But it was enough, too, to give Dallas Area Rapid Transit reason to expect – even if it wasn’t guaranteeing – that its light rail service would be back in business Monday morning for the first time since Friday.

“The goal is to have the full system operational,” spokesman Morgan Lyons said.

Crews worked all weekend to retrieve stranded trains from across the rail network after ice built up on the overhead wires that power the system.

The outage, similar to a systemwide shutdown during Super Bowl week in 2011, is the longest ever for DART.

“What we have been able to do so far has been encouraging, but there are still some areas of the system where we haven’t been able to run our trains,” Lyons cautioned Sunday.

Those areas are in the northern reaches of the network, at stations in Carrollton on the Green Line and in Plano on the Red Line, he said.

“We do feel, though, that we will be able to restore a lot of the service – we think we will be able to have it all running” Monday, he said.

Still the agency isn’t taking chances, he said. It will have buses at each of the rail stations in case the trains don’t work.

Treacherous roads

Texas Transportation Department officials warned Sunday that even though all area highways had been reopened, drivers should take “extreme caution” Monday, especially on bridges and ramps.

Some stretches of interstate, including I-20 west of Fort Worth and I-35 in Denton County, had been all but shut down as a result of ice that piled 6 inches deep. Only by bringing in motor-graders with serrated blades was TxDOT able to chop up the ice enough to treat it with salt.

“As soon as this starts to freeze again, all of this water is going to become black ice,” said Matt Zavadsky, spokesman for MedStar. “We are very concerned about the afternoon, evening and especially morning commute.”

Zavadsky said scores of calls for emergency ambulance service came in over the weekend for women who needed rides to hospitals to give birth.

By Sunday, others just wanted to get out of the house.

Steve White of Dallas was ready to go just about anywhere. But as soon as he got to the dairy aisle at the Kroger in Oak Lawn, he was ready to go back home again – to warm up.

“It’s too cold,” said White, who arrived in Dallas five years ago from Iowa. “I moved here to get away from the cold.”

Where’s the lettuce?

He was one of the lucky ones to find what he was looking for at the grocery. Produce aisles at many area stores were quickly emptied late last week, and deliveries still have not been made.

Customers at the Kroger bought $15,000 in produce Thursday during a pre-storm rush, said produce manager Israel Gonzales. Since then, few trucks have managed to make their deliveries from a warehouse in Keller, he said. On Saturday, only a truck with sacks of potatoes arrived.

“They say they’re going to come in to deliver, but we don’t know when,” he said. Dallasnews