Millions of Americans have shivered through another night of below-freezing temperatures after a colossal winter storm heaped more snow on the north-east United States and kept parts of the South coated in ice. At least 30 deaths have been reported in the worst-hit areas.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said the state was in the grip of an “Arctic siege”, and leading Georgia meteorologist William Lanxton described it as “perhaps the biggest ice storm we have expected in more than a decade”.
Deep snow – over 30 centimetres – extending in a 2100-kilometre swath from Arkansas to New England – has halted traffic, cancelled flights and triggered wide school closures.
The National Weather Service said areas north of Pittsburgh received up to 50 centimetres of snow and faced wind chills as low as minus 31 degrees late on Monday into Tuesday.
A rising death toll included two people run over by snowploughs in Massachusetts and Ohio, fatal sledging accidents in Arkansas and Texas, and a woman whose body was found covered in snow by police with bloodhounds after she was last seen leaving a Kansas bar.
In New York City, officials said eight people were found dead outdoors in the course of the frigid weekend.
There were still more than 690,000 power outages across the country on Monday afternoon (Tuesday AEDT), according to poweroutage.com.
Most were in the South, where weekend blasts of freezing rain snapped tree limbs and power lines, causing crippling outages in northern Mississippi and parts of Tennessee.
Areas of Mississippi were reeling in the aftermath of the state’s worst ice storm since 1994. Officials have scrambled to get cots, blankets, bottled water and generators to warming stations in hard-hit areas.
The University of Mississippi, where most students hunkered down without power, cancelled classes for the entire week as its Oxford campus remained coated in treacherous ice.
Oxford Mayor Robyn Tannehill said on social media that so many trees, limbs and power lines had fallen that “it looks like a tornado went down every street”.
A pair of falling tree branches damaged real estate agent Tim Phillips’ new garage, broke a window and cut off power to his home in Oxford. He said many ofhis neighbours had homes or vehicles damaged.
“It’s just one of those things that you try to prepare for,” Phillips said, “but this one was just unreal.”
More than 8000 flights were delayed or cancelled on Monday, according to flightaware.com. On Sunday, 45 per cent of US flights were cancelled, the highest number since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
More light to moderate snow was forecast in New England on Monday evening.
New York City saw its snowiest day in years, with neighbourhoods recording 20 to 38 centimetres of snow. Though public schools shut down, roughly 500,000 students were told to log in for online lessons. School “snow days” melted away in New York, the nation’s largest public school system, after remote learning took off during the coronavirus pandemic.
Bitter cold grips
Meanwhile, bitter cold followed in the storm’s wake. Communities across the Midwest, South, and Northeast awoke Monday to sub-zero weather.
The entire Lower 48 states were forecast to have their coldest average low temperature since January 2014, of minus 12 degrees.
In the Nashville, Tennessee, area, while electricity returned to thousands of homes and businesses on Monday, more than 170,000 others awoke to find their homes without power after freezing temperatures overnight.
Many hotels were sold out to residents escaping dark and frigid houses.
Alex Murray booked a Nashville hotel room for his family to ensure they had a working freezer to preserve pumped breast milk to feed their 6-month-old daughter. Anticipating a long wait for power to be restored at his home, Murray planned to extend their hotel stay until Wednesday.
“I know there’s many people that may not be able to find a place or pay for a place or anything like that, or even travel,” Murray said. “So, we were really fortunate.”
Storm leads to deaths in a number of states
In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s office said at least eight people were found dead outside as temperatures plunged between Saturday and Monday morning, though the cause of their deaths remained under investigation.
In Emporia, Kansas, police searching with bloodhounds found thebody of a 28-year-old teacher beneath the snow. Police said she was last seen leaving a bar without her coat or phone.
Police said snowploughs backed into two people who died in Norwood, Massachusetts, and Dayton, Ohio. And authorities said two teenagers, one in Arkansas and another in Texas, were killed in sledging accidents.
Officials reported four deaths in Tennessee, three deaths apiece in Louisiana and Pennsylvania; two deaths in Mississippi; and one in New Jersey.
AP
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