Freezing rain can cause quite a havoc here in central Europe too.
A few years ago there was a case of freezing temperatures flowed by a big rain storm. This caused a good 1cm of ice to build up on anything, cars, signs, trees, overhead cables etc. Usually its just a annoyance ot having to scrape and defrost your car for a good half hour before you can drive to work. But this much ice becomes so heavy that trees start falling one after the other, offten falling across roads and cutting off the more remote areas from the world when it all happens at once. Some trees fall onto overhead electrical lines, in some cases enough ice builds up on the wires themselves to make them snap or break the insulators, this even brought down one or two big 400kV lines with quite a spectacle associated with it. Some places ware left without power for days or even weeks, whole country was in chaos outside of any major cities.
Luckily my area was not hit too bad, we lost power for half a day a few times and you had to watch out when driving on roads that go trough forests, but that's about it. We kept the house warm with a fireplace in the living room, but we still had water and cellphone reception all the time. Its a very rare thing, people don't even recall this ever happening here before.