Tens of millions of Americans yesterday were digging out on a bitterly cold day in the aftermath of a monster winter storm that dumped a foot of snow from New Mexico to New England, paralysed much of the eastern United States, and caused at least 21 deaths and scuttled thousands of flights.
From New York and Massachusetts in the northeast to Texas and North Carolina in the south, roads were frozen slick with ice and buried under often more than a foot of snow.
At least 25 governors declared states of emergency.
In some southern states, residents faced winter conditions unseen for decades, with inch-thick ice bringing down trees and power lines.
In Frisco, Texas, a 16-year-old girl died in a sledding accident; another youth died in Saline County, Arkansas, while being pulled by an ATV vehicle over snow and ice when it struck a tree, authorities said. In Pennsylvania, three people died while shoveling snow, local media reported.
In Austin, Texas, a person died of apparent hypothermia while trying to shelter at an abandoned fuel station, authorities said. At least five people died in New York City from exposure to the cold, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said, urging residents to call for help if they saw anyone out on the street in need. While the storm system was drifting away from the East Coast into the Atlantic yesterday, a blast of Arctic air was rushing in from Canada behind it, prolonging sub-freezing temperatures for several more days, the National Weather Service said.
“This storm is exiting the East Coast now, with some lingering snow squalls,” said Allison Santorelli, a meteorologist with the NWS’s Weather Prediction Centre. “But the big picture story is the extreme cold, it’s lasting into early February.”
Almost 200m Americans were under some form of extreme cold alert, from along the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, forecasters said. Lubbock, Texas, had a low of -20C yesterday, and New York City, Washington DC and Boston all faced single-digit temperatures through much of the week ahead.
Nearly 800,000 customers, including both homes and businesses, across the southeastern US were facing the cold weather without power, according to the tracking site PowerOutage.us, including 246,000 in Tennessee. The storm snarled air traffic, with more than 12,500 US flights cancelled on Sunday – the most of any day since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020.
About 3,900 flights within, into or out of the US had already been canceled yesterday as of 9.15am ET (1415 GMT)
The storm’s mix of snow, ice and freezing rain turned many roads and highways dangerously slick.
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