Ice Storm II may be cold, but unlike most Hollywood sequels, this one isn’t as bad as the original.
Some differences:
Last year my apartment lost power and I spent the week sleeping in the UATV studio on an air mattress. I had to drive a mile to find a shower I could use.
This year, I’ve spent the past 24 hours in my home, watching BBC Shakespeare on Netflix Streaming and putting together clips for Razorback Reels. I even have work tonight.
Last year, UATV canceled its regular programming and relied on weather cut-ins.
This year, we’re still doing weather cut-ins, but AM Arkansas went live Friday at 7 am, right on schedule. We’ve also been breaking news updates via our twitter account. We were the first news outlet in the world to break the story of UA’s class cancellation, beating The Traveler’s twitter by about 30 seconds.
Last year, I described the city as an “icy, Martian landscape. Fayetteville certainly looked like it was in a Roland Emmerich flick. I braced myself, half-expecting to see bread riots at Wal-Mart or maybe even a family of refugees forced to cannibalize each other to survive.”
This year, all the trees that would fall down are already dead, and the roads are comparatively safer.
The only bad part about this year’s storm is its lack of photogenicness. There aren’t really any pictures I can take this year that I couldn’t last year; but there were plenty last year of downed power lines and crushed houses that I can’t take now.