Sunday in town will be sunny and cold, with a high of nine degrees. Sunrise is 6:40 and sunset is 5:35, for 10h 55m 34s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with eighteen percent of its visible disk illuminated.
In the Friday FREE WHITEWATER poll, readers voted on their preferred Best Picture winner at tonight’s Academy Awards ceremony. A plurality of respondents favored American Sniper (28.57%), with Boyhood coming in next (16.33%), then The Theory of Everything (14.29%), The Grand Budapest Hotel (12.24%), Birdman (10.2%), Whiplash (8.16%), and Selma (4.08%).
Ice cycle fringe on telephone wires & fences. From Milwaukee Journal Archives, via NWS.
It’s cold today, but in on February 22, 1922, Wisconsin saw much worse:
1922 – Ice Storm Wreaks Havoc
Unprecedented freezing rain and snow assaulted the Midwest February 21-23, 1922. In Wisconsin, the central and southern parts of the state were most severely affected, with the counties between Lake Winnebago and Lake Michigan south to Racine being hardest hit. Ice coated trees and power lines, bringing them down and cutting off electricity, telephone and telegraph services.
Cities were isolated, roads were impassible, rivers rose, streets and basements flooded, and train service stopped or slowed. Near Little Chute a passenger train went off the rails, injuring several crew members. Appleton housed 150 stranded traveling salesmen, near Plymouth a sheet of river ice 35 feet long and nearly three feet thick washed onto the river bank, while in Sheboygan police rescued a flock of chickens and ducks from their flooded coop and a sick woman from her flooded home.
Icy streets caused numerous automobile accidents, but the only reported deaths were a team of horses in Appleton that were electrocuted by a fallen power line. Sources: Wisconsin newspaper accounts, February 22 and 23, including the Appleton Post-Crescent, the Sheboygan Press, Waukesha Daily Freeman, Oshkosh Daily Northwestern.
For more about the storm, see This Day in Weather History for southeast Minnesota, northeast Iowa, and western Wisconsin. On page 20, National Weather Service meteorologists Todd Rieck and Jeff Boyne describes the conditions in Wisconsin during 1922 ice storm.