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A colossal winter storm was responsible for more than 40 deaths as it brought more snow to the north-east and maintained icy conditions in the south, leaving many across the US without electricity.
The deaths were registered in more than a dozen states afflicted by severe cold, according to reports. There were still about 550,000 power outages in the nation on Tuesday morning, according to poweroutage.us. Most of the outages 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. Officials warned that it could take days for power to be restored.
Deep snow – over a foot (30cm) extending in a 1,300-mile (2,100km) swath from Arkansas to New England – halted traffic, canceled flights and triggered widespread school closures. The National Weather Service said areas north of Pittsburgh received up to 20in of snow and faced wind chills as low as -25F (-32C) late Monday into Tuesday.
The bitter cold was not going away. The weather service a fresh influx of Arctic air was expected to sustain freezing temperatures in places already covered in snow and ice. Forecasters said it was possible that another winter storm could hit parts of the east coast this weekend.
The rising death toll included two people run over by snowplows in Massachusetts and Ohio, fatal sledding accidents that killed teenagers 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 over the frigid weekend.
Three young brothers fell into an icy pond outside the north Texas town of Bonham. The boys – aged six, eight and nine – died, as their mother, Cheyenne Hangaman, tried to jump into the freezing water and save them.
“I couldn’t really hardly do anything,” Hangaman told Fox 4 News. “It was just one of me and three of them. And they were all needing me at one time and I couldn’t … I just couldn’t save them.”
In Mississippi, officials scrambled to bring cots, blankets, bottled water and generators to warming stations in hard-hit areas in the aftermath of the state’s worst ice storm since 1994. At least 14 homes, one business and 20 public roads had major damage, Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, said.
The University of Mississippi, where most students hunkered down without power, canceled classes for the entire week as its Oxford campus remained coated in treacherous ice. Oxford’s 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”.
The US had more than 14,000 flight delays or cancellations on Monday, according to the flight tracker flightaware.com. On Sunday, 45% of US flights were cancelled, making it the highest day for cancellations since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the aviation analytics firm Cirium.
The impact extended far beyond the storm’s reach because such major hubs as the Dallas-Fort Worth international airport were clobbered by the storm, stranding planes and flight crews.
New York City saw its snowiest day in years, with neighborhoods recording between 8 and 15in of snow. Though public schools shut down, roughly 500,000 students were told to log in for online lessons on Monday.
Meanwhile, bitter cold followed in the storm’s wake. Communities across the midwest, south, and orth-east awakened on Monday to subzero weather. All of the US’s 48 contiguous states were forecast to have their coldest average low temperature of -9.8F since January 2014.
In the Nashville area, electricity returned for thousands of homes and businesses on Monday. About 146,000 others still did not have power after subfreezing temperatures overnight. Many hotels were sold out overnight to residents escaping dark and frigid homes.
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 six-month-old daughter. Anticipating a long wait until power gets restored at his home, Murray planned to extend their hotel stay through 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.”
Guardian staff contributed reporting
