Tens of millions of Americans were digging out on a bitterly cold Monday in the aftermath of a winter storm that paralysed much of the eastern United States, caused at least 29 deaths and scuttled thousands of flights.
Deep snow – over 30cm extending 2,100km from Arkansas to New England – halted traffic, cancelled flights and triggered wide school closures.
The National Weather Service said areas north of Pittsburgh got up to 50cm of snow and faced wind chills as low as minus 31C degrees late on Monday and into Tuesday.
The bitter cold afflicting two-thirds of the US wasn’t going away.
RM Block
The weather service said that a fresh influx of Arctic air is expected to sustain freezing temperatures in places already covered in snow and ice, and forecasters said it’s possible another winter storm could hit parts of the East Coast this weekend.
From New York and Massachusetts in the northeast to Texas and North Carolina in the south, roads were frozen with ice and buried under snow. At least 25 governors declared states of emergency.
In some southern states, residents faced winter conditions unseen for decades, with thick ice bringing down trees and power lines.
The storm was blamed for at least 18 deaths across multiple states.
In Frisco, Texas, a 16-year-old girl died in a sledding accident on Sunday; 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 shovelling snow, local media reported.
In Austin, Texas, a person died of apparent hypothermia while trying to shelter at an abandoned gas station, authorities said. At least five people died in New York City from exposure to the cold, mayor Zohran Mamdani said on Sunday, 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 on Monday, a blast of Arctic air was rushing in from Canada behind it, prolonging subfreezing temperatures for several more days, the National Weather Service (NWS) 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 Center. “But the big picture story is the extreme cold, it’s lasting into early February.”
Almost 200 million 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 minus 20 degrees on Monday, and New York City, Washington DC and Boston all faced very low temperatures through much of the week ahead.
There were still more than 670,000 power outages in the nation on Monday evening, according to poweroutage.com. Most of them were in the south, where weekend blasts of freezing rain caused tree limbs and power lines to snap, inflicting crippling outages on northern Mississippi and parts of Tennessee.
The storm affected 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 been cancelled on Monday as 2.15pm Irish time, according to the tracking website FlightAware. US transportation secretary Sean Duffy told CNBC he hopes airports will be “back to normal” by Wednesday.
The storm’s mix of snow, ice and freezing rain turned many roads and highways dangerously slick.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ryan DuVal spent part of Sunday driving his vintage fire truck through the city’s icy streets, looking for anyone who needed help.
“I just saw a need for getting people out of the cold,” he said. “You know, just cruise the streets, see someone, offer a ride. If they take it, great. If not, I can at least warm them up in the truck and just get them a water, meal, something.”
In Bonito Lake, New Mexico, residents were shovelling out after 79cm of snow. New York City’s Central Park received 29cm, while Logan Airport in Boston saw 47cm, Ms Santorelli said.
New York governor Kathy Hochul said she had mobilised National Guard troops in New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley to assist with the state’s emergency storm response.
Announcing that schools would be shut for a remote school day, Mr Mamdani quipped: “I know that this may disappoint some students, so if you do see me, feel free to throw a snowball at me.”
Still, despite the disruptions, the winter conditions were fun for many, including in Washington DC, where a huge crowd gathered on Sunday for a raucous impromptu snowball fight in Meridian Hill Park.
Families brought sleds to Capitol Hill, where children zoomed down the steep slope below the white-domed seat of the US Congress. – Reuters/AP/Guardian
