More than 10,000 Flights Canceled as Massive Winter Storm Sweeps Across US
A sprawling winter storm blanketed much of the country today with snow, sleet and freezing rain, stretching from the South through New England and triggering brutal cold, extensive power outages and hazardous travel conditions.
Forecasters said icy precipitation would persist through Monday across many regions, followed by a deep freeze that would keep conditions dangerous for days. The National Weather Service warned that “dangerous travel and infrastructure impacts” were likely to continue well after the storm system moves on.
Meteorologists said heavy snow was likely from the Ohio Valley into the Northeast, while areas from the Lower Mississippi Valley through the Southeast and into the Mid-Atlantic faced the threat of “catastrophic ice accumulation.”
“It is a unique storm in the sense that it is so widespread,” National Weather Service meteorologist Allison Santorelli said during a phone interview. “It was affecting areas all the way from New Mexico, Texas, all the way into New England, so we’re talking like a 2,000 mile spread.”
Santorelli said roughly 213 million people were under some form of winter weather alert as of Sunday morning. At the same time, poweroutage.us reported that nearly 800,000 utility customers were without electricity, a figure that continued to climb.
Tennessee reported the most severe outages, with more than 250,000 customers in the dark. Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi each had outages exceeding 100,000 customers.
Air travel was also heavily disrupted. According to flight tracker flightaware.com, more than 10,000 flights were canceled by Sunday, with an additional 8,000 delayed. Major disruptions were reported at airports serving Philadelphia, Washington, Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina, as well as New York and New Jersey.
Santorelli cautioned that the hazards would not end once precipitation stops.
“Behind the storm it’s just going to get bitterly cold across basically the entirety of the eastern two-thirds of the nation, east of the Rockies,” she said. Prolonged cold temperatures, she added, will slow melting and complicate efforts to restore power and repair damaged infrastructure.
President Donald Trump approved emergency declarations for at least a dozen states by Saturday, with additional approvals expected. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said the Federal Emergency Management Agency had already staged supplies, personnel, and search-and-rescue teams across multiple states.
In and around Nashville, ice accumulations reached half an inch or more, coating power lines and weighing down trees until branches snapped and crashed onto roads and utility equipment.
“We typically say that once you start seeing, you know, roughly a half an inch of ice, that’s when you’re going to start seeing the more widespread power outages,” Santorelli said.
In Oxford, Mississippi, police urged residents Sunday morning to remain indoors due to extreme danger outdoors. Utility crews were also ordered off the roads overnight as conditions worsened.
“Due to life-threatening conditions, Oxford Utilities has made the difficult decision to pull our crews off the road for the night,” the utility company wrote in an early Sunday Facebook post.
“The situation is currently too dangerous to continue,” the post said. “Trees are actively snapping and falling around our linemen while they are in the bucket trucks. We simply cannot clear the lines faster than the limbs are falling.”
Travel conditions were also treacherous in north Georgia, where ice coated roadways.
{Matzav.com}
