Creation Care Mom

It doesn’t take much news to see that winter weather in the United States has been havoc over the last few weeks. Severe cold and huge snowfall amounts contrasting with fires in LA and extreme drought.

I’ve been in the middle of some of it.

We flew to Salt Lake City for the holidays. As is all travel during the winter, we knew there was a chance for weather disruption, but we were unprepared for the scale of it. We packed winter gear expecting to need it during our time in Utah or our time in Idaho. Surprise! We only needed snow gear because we chose to drive up into the mountains. Our Christmas turned out to simply be a drizzly day. Almost all the precipitation that fell during our ten day trip was rain. What does that do to the western states that depend on snow for water much of the year?

As we got closer and closer to our trip home, I saw the weather reports coming out of the midwest, the national weather service warnings, and I knew are flight was going to be cutting it close. Of course, in our modern day environment, you pay the price if you change your flight, unless under exceptional circumstances. By the time we had the option to move our flight any earlier, there was no availability for us to make it.

Leaving Salt Lake City on the morning of January 4th was surreal. The snow was softly falling, yet I knew the same storm would slam into Kansas the next day with blizzard like conditions. We boarded our flight eager to be home, feeling like every minute counted in our race to beat the bad weather.

And THEN,

We sat on the tarmac.

For almost a hour.

Waiting for de-icing.

Let’s say it was a very anxious day.

James did great. He was such a trooper.

We landed in Kansas City around 2:20pm. At 3, they closed the runways down due to the quickly accumulating ice. We may have been one of the last planes to land. Planes in route were diverted to Omaha until the runways were cleared.

We quickly loaded our belongings into the vehicle picking us up and started the slow crawl home to Topeka. With the freezing rain falling, it was clear it would be a long trip. Took twice the time in fact.

Having been gone for 10 days, I had to make an immediate grocery store run. Thank goodness I had had the foresight to prepare my list earlier. At the store, I found some things gone, but was able to get most of what we needed in order to hunker down for 2-3 days. I’m so glad I did.

Sunday truly was blizzard. Over the course of the day, we got buried in snow with final totals close to 14 inches! The third highest amount recorded in Topeka! Because of the kind of snow and the windy conditions, some areas had less than an inch or drifts over knee high. We lost power for a short period of time, but were prepared for it to be out longer if needed.

Our vehicles didn’t move for days. We tried but got stuck one foot out of the driveway on Monday. Wednesday we finally managed to drive around town in one vehicle, but the other was still coated in ice. With minor melting over the last week, we’ve had thaw and freeze cycles wreck havoc on the roads, but do little to impact the coating of snow on the ground. In fact, we got even more snow on Thursday night!

So why talk about this?

Climate change doesn’t just change summers. It changes winter too. Precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. Making snow events bigger. Fewer chances at snow, but each one leaving more inches on the ground would be completely expected. In another way, polar vortex air is more likely to escape south in a warming world. (I know it seems counterintuitive!) So the cold spell bringing freezing temps to northern Florida? More common because of climate change.

When these weather news headlines cross our tv, so often there is some connection to climate change. And so many of you are also living through weather events charged and altered by climate change.

What’s your story?