More than 700,000 households and businesses in the US are without power and over 10,000 flights are expected to be cancelled ahead of a monster winter storm that threatens to paralyse eastern states with heavy snowfall.
Forecasters said snow, sleet, freezing rain and dangerously frigid temperatures would sweep the eastern two-thirds of the nation on Sunday and into next week. Those warnings came after three people were found dead Saturday afternoon on New York City streets “from weather-related circumstances” amid the brutally cold temperatures, as the local NBC affiliate reported.
“Up to [18] inches will fall over New England, and 0.50 inches of freezing rain over parts of the Mid-Atlantic and Ohio/Tennessee Valleys,” the National Weather Service (NWS) reported on Sunday with respect to the heavy snow and ice accumulation expected from the winter storm. “Furthermore, heavy rain will develop over the Lower Mississippi Valley on Sunday and parts of the Tennessee Valley on Monday.
“In the wake of the storm, communities from the Southern Plains to the north-east will contend with bitterly cold temperatures and dangerously cold wind chills.”
Calling the storms “historic”, Donald Trump on Saturday approved federal emergency disaster declarations in South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, and West Virginia.
“We will continue to monitor, and stay in touch with all States in the path of this storm. Stay Safe, and Stay Warm,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia had declared weather emergencies, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said. The DHS secretary, Kristi Noem, at a news conference on Saturday, warned people to take precautions.
“It’s going to be very, very cold,” Noem said. “So we’d encourage everybody to stock up on fuel, stock up on food, and we will get through this together.” She added: “We have utility crews that are working to restore that as quick as possible.”
The number of outages continued to rise. As of 6.30am EST (1130 GMT) on Sunday, more than 700,000 US customers were without electricity, according to PowerOutage.us. Nearly 250,000 of those outages were in Tennessee while Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas reported in excess of 100,000.
The Department of Energy on Saturday issued an emergency order authorising the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to deploy backup generation resources at data centres and other major facilities, aiming to limit blackouts in the state.
On Sunday, the department issued an emergency order to authorise the grid operator, PJM Interconnection, to run “specified resources” in the mid-Atlantic region, regardless of limits due to state laws or environmental permits.
The National Weather Service warned of an unusually expansive and long-duration winter storm that would bring widespread, heavy ice accumulation in the south-east, where “crippling to locally catastrophic impacts” could be expected.
Forecasters predicted record low temperatures and dangerously cold wind chills descending further into the Great Plains region by Monday.
More than 9,600 US flights scheduled for Sunday had been cancelled, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware, with more than 4,000 flights cancelled on Saturday. More than 1,800 flight cancellations have also been reported for Monday.
Up to 8in of snow with sleet has been reported in and around Little Rock, Arkansas, and almost three-quarter inch of ice accumulation was reported near Hall Summit, Louisiana, southeast of Shreveport, according to the Weather Channel, with highest snowfall totals surpassing a foot in New Mexico.
Major US airlines warned passengers to stay alert for abrupt flight changes and cancellations. Delta Air Lines adjusted its schedule on Saturday, with additional cancellations in the morning for Atlanta and along the east coast, including in Boston and New York City. It would relocate experts from cold-weather hubs to support de-icing and baggage teams at several southern airports, the airline said.
JetBlue said that as of Saturday morning it had cancelled about 1,000 flights through Monday. United Airlines said it had cancelled some flights in places with the worst expected weather.
US electric grid operators on Saturday stepped up precautions to avoid rotating blackouts. Dominion Energy, whose Virginia operations include the largest collection of datacentres in the world, said if its ice forecast held, the winter event could be among the largest to affect the company.
