Winter Storm Fern Postmortem

PBN Link-  https://www.youtube.com/live/8NpbTZFOBdA?si=QarLn-swARRj03wa

Winter Storm Fern looked like a snowmaker, but the lasting threat turned out to be bitter cold, sketchy secondary roads, and a patchwork of power outages that tested patience and planning. We walk through what actually happened across Central Virginia and the Southeast, what the outage data says about restoration timelines, and how to make better day-to-day choices when the forecast swings and the mercury drops. No drama—just clear takeaways you can use to keep your home warm, your food safe, and your family steady.

We break down why some interstates were dry while neighborhoods stayed dicey, why heat pumps falter in single-digit temps, and how a pellet or wood-burning insert can take pressure off your HVAC. You’ll hear the simple upgrades that paid off fast—like wireless fridge and freezer thermometers to verify cooling and prevent food loss after a repair or replacement. We also talk soberly about winter safety culture: tragic sledding accidents, how nostalgia can cloud risk, and practical ways to keep fun in the snow without flirting with catastrophe.

Alongside the storm postmortem, we touch on community and caution. Giveaways bring joy, but scammers listen too, so we share the exact rules for claiming a prize safely and the only email address that will reach out with codes. If you care about resilient living, this conversation centers on small, smart steps: consolidate trips, monitor outages with reliable sources, layer clothing and rooms, and plan for backup heat that actually moves warm air where you need it. If this helped you think differently about winter prep, tap follow, share with a friend who needs a plan before the next cold snap, and leave a quick review to help others find the show.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Giveaway Winners
• 1:46 Beware Scam Emails About Prizes
• 2:47 Live Guest Spot And Link Plan
• 3:21 Storm Totals And Local Conditions
• 5:22 Power Outages Across States
• 7:21 Tragic Incidents And Safety Lessons
• 9:25 Forecast Uncertainty And Naming Rant
• 10:59 Fridge Upgrade And Temperature Monitors
• 12:01 Heat Pump Limits And Stove Options
• 13:29 Staying Warm And Closing Thanks

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:17

To the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, where prepping doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Coming to you from a well-defended off-grid compound high in the mountains. Coming to you from his Florida room in Richmond, Virginia. Neither off-grid nor well-defended, unless you count as chickens and cats, here is your host, Keith.

SPEAKER_01: 0:40

Hey everybody, this is Keith, and welcome back to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, January the 26th, 2026. If you're hearing my voice, myself, the chickens and the cats made it safely through Winter Storm Fern. We'll do a postmortem here in just a few minutes. But first, let's go ahead and take care of our giveaway for that$25 Amazon gift card. I got all the names loaded up on some wheel, looks like some big roulette wheel, some app. And let me spin it. Let's make make it a bunch of funky sounds. And the winner is oh oh Devin. Devin, you won a$25 Amazon gift card. I appreciate the entry. Tell you what, we're gonna do it again. We had so many really cool entries, really cool emails. Here we go. We're gonna do one more. Devin was our first winner, and Jeff. Jeffrey, you are a winner. So, Jeff and Devin, go ahead and expect an email here later on tonight or first thing tomorrow morning. Your winnings it'll be an Amazon digital gift card code. There are bots and there are all sorts of programs that listen to these podcasts. I can tell you that for sure because sometimes I get these AI-generated emails that make absolutely no sense what but there are bots out there that scrape websites and scrape podcasts. So this email will come from me, practical preppodcast at gmail.com. Folks out there that have entered, ignore any other email. If it looks like it's from me or you get a link, hey, click this link to claim your prize. I'm gonna send it from me, practicalpreppodcast at gmail.com, and you're going to get a code. No links, no crazy stuff like that. If anybody out there gets a funky looking email with a crazy link, don't click on it, don't even open it. It's somebody trying to scam you. So, Devin and Jeffrey, you are the winners. Thank you so much for everybody who entered, and we'll do more giveaways soon. Tonight at about 8 p.m., about 200 hours EST, I'm gonna do another guest spot on the Prepper Broadcasting Network with James. We're gonna do a postmortem as well. I will put a link to that. I will edit this podcast later on tonight, and I will add that link to the show notes. So if you're listening to the podcast and you don't see the link, it's because we haven't recorded that podcast tonight, that particular episode. And I will edit this podcast with that link as soon as it's available. Okay, let's talk about the storm. Here in Central Virginia, here in Central Virginia, we did not get nearly the amount of snow that they were initially predicting. And that's just the nature of the business. Sometimes the meteorologists are right on point, and sometimes they're not so much. So in Richmond, we got between two and five inches on the average. I got two inches here at my house, and about a quarter inch of sleet and freezing rain. The minimal amount of freezing rain and sleet is the reason why I still have power. Now, right behind this, let me give you the highs and the lows for the next week to 10 days here in Richmond. Tonight, 13, Tuesday, 10, 11, 8, 9, next Saturday, 8, Sunday, 13, next Monday, a week from today, 11 degrees. The high is like 29 to 32 degrees. So the really crappy roads and all the ice and snow out there is not going to melt. So hats off to the Virginia Department of Transportation and all the other contractors they hired because the major thoroughfares, I-95, Route 288, and some of the major thoroughfares around Richmond, Virginia, are down to the bare pavement and for the most part are very dry. There are some spots that will freeze over, which will make driving very treacherous later on tonight and then through the rest of the week. This is not going to melt, or if it does, it's going to re-freeze very quickly. My neighborhood had to put the Jeep into four-wheel drive just to get out of the neighborhood. I would not expect any of the secondary roads to be plowed for the next couple days. And if you live in a neighborhood or a subdivision, you're basically on your own. You're just going to have to get out there and suck it up and try to get out of your neighborhood the best way you can, the safest way you can. So at the peak of the storm, there were roughly 1.1 million folks without power. Tennessee got slammed. Tennessee by far has the most people currently without power. There's a really cool website I found out about, poweroutage.com. It's a big database that scrapes all the other states, scrapes their data. And currently, there are approximately 682,000 folks without power here in the lower 48. Tennessee tops the list at 221,000, Mississippi right behind it with 150. Louisiana, 111K, Texas, 43k, Kentucky 35K. Now, early Saturday, late Friday night, early Saturday, Texas was way up around 55,000. But as the storm moved west and started hitting the east coast, that's when Texas and Louisiana started seeing a little bit of relief. They've been without this storm for about 36 hours now. So they're playing a little bit of catch up. But for us, it's going to be several days before these folks get their power back. It was it was a significant storm. So the totals, so as far as the storm itself goes, up in the northeast part of Pennsylvania, some towns got 22 inches of snow. Now that's not the highest snow total for this storm. The highest snow total was 31 inches, and it was some mountain range out west, like the Frito Bandito mountain range got 31 inches. That's a lot of snow, but they normally get a lot of snow and they get a lot of snow storms. So the Frito Bandito range out there west, they got their 31 inches. That's not uncommon for them to see a lot of snow. So not taking anything away from the folks out there in Frito Bandito land, but we're gonna have to give it to Northeast Pennsylvania, coming in at about 22 inches of snow. Now, when it comes to storms like this, it is always, always sad to report that there were some serious injuries as well as some fatalities associated with this storm. So far, there's been 25 fatalities reported as a result of this storm. A lot of vehicle accidents, hypothermia associated with the severe cold, as well as the power outages, and sledding tragedies. I hate to read about these things. There were two young adults, one in Texas and one in Arkansas, that were killed while they were sledding. They were being pulled by a vehicle with a rope holding onto the sled. And what happens? They go around a corner, they get a little crazy, they go flying off to the side, and both of these young adults either hit a tree or hit a curb and then bounced into a tree. Absolutely tragic. Now, to that point, when I was growing up in Chicago, especially, we would do something that's called skitching. When a car would come up to a stop sign, a bunch of kids will be standing around, we'd be throwing snowballs, just messing around. And as soon as the car would pull away, we would run up behind the car and we would hold on underneath the bumper. This is when cars had steel bumpers, not the plastic bumpers that you probably couldn't get a hold of these days. We actually held on to the bumper of these cars and trucks, and they pulled us through the neighborhood. We just had our snowshoes on or our snow boots, and they were like our little skis. Talk about, talk about dangerous things, but we were kids and we just didn't even think. That's part of being a kid, I guess. You just don't think about the consequences about something as simple as trying to go out and have fun in the snow. So I certainly feel terrible for these young adults, their families and friends. A situation that they just want to go out and have a little bit of fun, and then look what happens. Absolutely tragic. So here in Richmond, like I said, I did not lose power. But like I said before, what I'm more worried about is the single-digit temperatures that are around for at least the next nine to ten days. Now there is a forecast next weekend for some snow, but who knows what that is going to be. The apps are calling for several inches of snow, but then again, the apps that I was looking at initially had two feet plus here in Richmond, Virginia. And we know that's not going to happen. So Winter Storm Fern is now gone. She is on her way out to sea. And I have come up with some additional names. The next one is like Gia Gianna or yeah, Gianna. I mean, who names these? The weather channel, who what intern is is naming these storms? Gianna? No. The next storm, if it's large enough to be named, it's not gonna be Gianna. It's gonna be Draven. D-R-A-V-E-N. That sounds like a winter storm. After that, Ravina. Ravina doesn't sound as ominous as Draven, but the next storm after Draven is Ravina, then Thorn. Thorn with an E. T-H-O-R-N-E, then we're going with Slade. Winter Storm Slade. That just I hope we never get to Winter Storm Slade, because if we get to a storm and we call it Slade, we're screwed. Anything with the name Slade, you know you're in deep, deep trouble. Then after Slade, we have Nyx, N Y X. Nyx doesn't sound very ominous, but after Slade comes through and wipes us out, I think we're gonna welcome a storm that sounds less badass than Slade. So kept power here. Chickens are in the garage. My fridge showed up just in time Saturday morning, and I didn't lose power. Great fridge, by the way, a frigid air, highly recommended. They pulled the old one out, these cats came in, dropped the new one, hooked it up, and within 20 minutes of them hooking it up, it was already down to temperature. I've purchased two wireless thermometers, one for the fridge, one for the freezer. And the reason I did that, if I didn't tell you, my other fridge that was on the fritz, the techs who came to repair it tried to tell me there was nothing wrong. That's a whole different thing. But anyway, about 20 minutes, 30 minutes tops. It was down to the temperature that I needed it. And I was able to move my food from my ice co fridge, dropped it right into the new fridge, and we're doing great. I have also decided that I am going to look into either a pellet stove insert or a wood stove insert. The size of my heat pump fits the square footage of the house. I have a single single-story rancher built in 1959, so it's brick in front of cinder block. So this thing is practically a tank. Back when my house was built, they really took pride in the workmanship in the masonry. You can tell, not a lot of wood in this house. Not knocking people who live in homes that are the little bricks and sticks. That's that's fine. But when I was looking for a home, I was looking for something that was not just a bunch of two by fours in drywall. So I digress. The heat pump really can't keep up with the temperatures and they get down to about 18 degrees. I don't need to go into how a heat pump works, but it's not the best option given the size of my house. So I'm gonna look into a pellet stove or a wood-burning fireplace insert and remove my gas logs. Gas logs are great, they do well for the living room, but I need something, I need the blower on both the insert and the pellet stove to circulate the heat through the house. So I'm gonna look into that. In the meantime, just throw on some extra thick socks, a hoodie, and I'm good to go. Under a couple different blankets, some quilts that my great great-grandmother handmade back in the day. Those things will probably lasted a second coming. And those are the warmest quilts I think I've ever had around. And several Afghans that my mother crocheted or knitted. I think you crochet Afghans. I don't think you knit them. I'm sure there's folks out there that are probably just rolling their eyes going, wait, you don't know the diff, you don't know the difference between knitting and crocheting. I don't. I know it's not needlepoint. I've seen needlepoint before, so I know my mom did not needlepoint in Afghan. That's something, right? Plus one for Keith knowing that his mother did not needlepoint in Afghan. All right, folks, stay warm. Congratulations to Jeffrey B and Devin Z. You are the winners of the Amazon gift cards. I will get those out to you in the next 24 hours. That email will be coming directly from me with your fancy little digital code. I appreciate you listening to this post mortem. And again, I'll be on the Prepper Broadcasting Network tonight at about 200 hours EST. And I will go back and edit the show notes and put the link to that guest spot at the top of my show notes. All right, folks, I will talk to everybody soon. If you don't have power, everybody stay warm. If you made it through the storm unscathed, congratulations. And as always, be careful out there. Take care of one another, and until next time.