Winter haven

The USPS National Center for Employee Development (NCED) in Norman, OK, opened its doors to help local fam­ilies who needed a warm place to stay.

An ice storm swept across Oklahoma in mid-December, blacking out a half million homes and busi­nesses in the biggest power outage in the state’s history. An estimated 30,000 Oklahomans remained without power as of last weekend.

NCED, a conference and housing campus, books an average of 900 rooms for postal employees and visitors weekly. Training is down during the holidays, so many of the facility’s rooms were available. During NCED’s peak phase of housing families or emergency crews in need of shelter, hundreds of its rooms were used. Some families are still there.