Live winter storm updates: Tallahassee coated in 2 inches of sleet mixed with snow

A historic winter storm that dumped snow and sleet on a wide swath of the Gulf Coast left Tallahassee covered in a blanket of the frozen stuff Wednesday morning.

The National Weather Service in Tallahassee recorded 1.9 inches of mostly sleet at its office on the campus of Florida State University.

Forecasters said it was too early to tell whether the ice and snow would approach or beat Tallahassee’s all-time snowfall record of 2.8 inches set in 1958.

Here are updates from the path of the winter storm:

The Tallahassee Police Department is urging people to stay off the roads, which were slick and icy Wednesday morning.

The city never saw widespread official road closures. The most notable was a brief shutdown of a stretch of Thomasville Road in northeast Tallahassee and a longer-term closure of the Capital Circle flyover leading to Interstate 10.

But city and police officials warned that all roads should be considered dangerous.

“Snowy, icy roads and continued freezing temps have created EXTREMELY dangerous roadway conditions,” the city said in a post on X/Twitter. “TPD urges residents to stay off the roads for their safety and for the safety of emergency responders.”

The city said emergency crews worked overnight to address issues and will continue working through the day.

“Road clearing crews spread more than 40 tons of sand over roadways including 25 bridges,” the city said. “As work continues, please stay off the roads. They are not safe for travel.”

Tallahassee appeared to have gotten mostly sleet, with some snow mixed in, from the winter storm system — the result of a powerful Arctic air mass that invaded the Deep South colliding with slightly warmer air from the Gulf of Mexico.

“Definitely, the vast majority of it was sleet,” said David Reese, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Tallahassee. “We may have had a couple of minutes periodically through the night that was pure snow. And there was a little bit of time periods last night and early this morning where it was a combination of freezing rain and sleet. So very, very icy.”

Reese said slightly warmer air — perhaps a degree above freezing — moved in over Tallahassee as part of a low pressure system that interacted with Arctic air already in place.

“By warmer, I’m talking 33 degrees,” Reese said. “I mean that’s really all it takes — hey you get snow or you get sleet. If it had been 32 or or less, it would have been at least mixed in with a fair amount of more snow.”

He said snowfall totals across southern Alabama and Georgia, where the air was much colder, ranged from 6 to 8 inches. Parts of the Florida Panhandle got as much as 5 inches of snow.

With a coating of ice on trees and power lines, the city of Tallahassee said it restored power to 10 circuits and about 12,000 customers overnight.

The city’s online power outage map showed about 557 customers without power as of about 7:55 a.m.

“Crews are actively working and will continue to work through the day,” the city said in a mass text to customers. “Additional outages could occur.”

Talquin Electrical Cooperative continued to struggle with widespread outages Wednesday morning in Wakulla County and southern and eastern Leon County, where freezing rain brought down lines. About 11% of the grid was offline at 8:15 a.m, with about half of customers in the dark in the Shadeville and Chaires areas.