Winter Weather — Laurel, Kentucky

2014-01-06 · Laurel, Kentucky

Event narrative

Interstate 75 was blocked due to an injury accident as a result of a vehicle loosing control on black ice. The injured motorist later died at the hospital.

Wider weather episode

An arctic cold front barreled across eastern Kentucky late Sunday January 5th ushering in what would be the coldest temperatures and wind chills experienced in 20 years. Gusty winds up to 50 mph along the front created a few isolated power outages. Rain falling in advance of the arctic front quickly changed over to snow by midnight Sunday night. By dawn on Monday, many areas had received from 1 to 3 inches of snow, with up to 5 inches on Black Mountain.

The big story was the cold. Temperatures by Tuesday morning January 7th ranged from 2 below zero to 9 below zero in the valleys of eastern Kentucky, down to 17 below zero at the top of Black Mountain. Gusty west to northwest winds combined with these temperatures to produce wind chills in the 15 to 30 below range for most locations, with the highest terrain along the Virginia border dropping even lower. The last time there were widespread below zero temperatures in eastern Kentucky was in the middle 1990s.

Several southeast Kentucky counties experienced water outages from the cold that lasted up to a week. The hardest hit counties were Perry and Floyd.

Source: NOAA Storm Events Database, event_id 482017. Narrative written by the NWS forecast office that issued the report.