ColdFusion wrote:Is there anyone here that went thru the 1983 Texas cold snap in Dallas? Curious how the infrastructure held up back then? Did parts of the city lose running water and how bad the power outages might have been?
I went through the 1983 freeze in Denison. We got a big snowfall at the beginning of the event, then reinforcing fronts several times, and it ended up being 295 consecutive hours at or below freezing in Sherman and Denison. Never dipped below zero, but it rarely got above the low 20s either. A few mornings in single digits, a few afternoons in the teens.
Lake Texoma's huge Big Mineral Arm (north of Hagerman National Wildlife Refuge) ended up freezing from one side to the other and most of the coves across the lake were several inches thick. Only the main lake out near the islands stayed completely ice free. One of my great friends who is older and had an air boat, he would slide across the ice at Texoma to his duck hunting spots. Smaller lakes were so fronzen that you could walk across them.
Water mains broke in numerous places across Denison and I remember seeing city crews digging and trying to get them fixed, so yes, there was a loss of water from time to town depending on where the broken mains were. There was some power redistribution, which forced some non-essential businesses to shut down so hospitals and homes could have heat, but I don't remember any outages. Same thing happened in the Feb. 1989 freeze and the Dec. 1989 freeze. We had tons of potholes develop around town, the vegetation took a beating, etc.
The fish kill along the coast is one of the things I remember most (I'm an outdoor writer by trade) and the redfish and speckled trout stocks were nearly wiped out along most of the Texas coast.