El Reno Once Again Prepares For Ice Storm

It’s expected that El Reno will be one of the hardest hit areas of the metro in this winter storm. The city could see up to three quarters of an inch of ice, but that’s nothing new for a city that’s been hit hard by winter weather many times before. 

If you stop by Kathy Haynes' trailer home in El Reno, you don’t want to say the words “ice storm.”

“Don't even mention that,” Haynes said. “We have had them here and last year was the whopper. We were without electricity. I had trees all over my car. It was bad. I don't want it, I don't want it."

In 2015, an ice storm left Haynes without power, and shivering in the dark for a week. This time around, however, she’s a little more prepared. 

"You can see I’ve already got my candles. I've got a generator out here, right outside the door. I'm getting prepared, Ok?” Haynes said. “Yes I am, because, yeah, no, I don't want it."

Nobody wants the winter weather in El Reno, but city leaders say they’re prepared too, at least as well as they can be.

“We feel pretty good about being prepared for it,” El Reno Mayor Matt White said. “It’s gonna come. It's gonna hit and I think by Sunday we'll be ok."

Emergency warming shelters are set up, sand trucks are ready, staff is on stand-by, and routes are planned for clearing ice.

"Always going to focus on our emergency routes, especially for our ambulance services, the hospital area, out in the park and just expand beyond that," El Reno Fire Chief Kent Lagaly said.

The city expects power outages, but they may not be as bad as previous years.

"Last year, so much of the infrastructure for the power companies was damaged.  Now it's new,” Lagaly said.

So for now, like everyone else in the state, folks in El Reno are waiting to see how bad it gets and looking forward to when it’s over. 

"We just sit and we waited it out. I’m still here. I survived,” Haynes said. “So I’ll be here this year to survive again."