Winter storm shuts airports, knocks out power as Arctic cold grips eastern U.S.
A powerful winter storm swept from the Ohio Valley and mid-South to New England with heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain, colliding with a deep Arctic blast that has locked in dangerous cold across much of the United States east of the Rockies.
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Winter storm warnings stretched across most of the eastern third of the country, covering about 118 million people, as the National Weather Service warned of widespread, prolonged travel disruptions and life-threatening wind chills. An estimated 157 million Americans faced frigid conditions ranging from subzero along the Canadian border to below freezing as far south as the Gulf Coast.
Air travel bore the brunt of the onslaught. Major U.S. carriers canceled more than 11,000 flights scheduled for Sunday, according to FlightAware, with Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport effectively shut down. Airports serving New York, Philadelphia and Charlotte, North Carolina, saw at least 80 percent of flights canceled.
On the ground, outages surged as freezing rain layered ice up to an inch thick across parts of the South, snapping tree limbs and downing transmission lines. More than 1 million homes and businesses in eight states from Texas to the Carolinas lost power at the storm’s peak, utility trackers showed. Tennessee suffered the heaviest blow, accounting for roughly a third of all outages. More than 800,000 customers remained without electricity as of 9:29 p.m. EST, according to PowerOutage.us.
Snow totals since the system formed Friday climbed past 30 centimeters in parts of Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul mobilized National Guard troops in New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley to bolster the state’s emergency response.
In the Mid-Atlantic, heavy snow flipped to sleet and freezing rain through the day, compounding road hazards and slowing plow operations. The weather service reported significant ice accretion across interior sections of the Eastern Seaboard reaching as far south as metro Atlanta, as the storm’s low-pressure center tracked through the Appalachians.
Federal authorities moved to shore up the grid as demand surged and ice weighed down infrastructure. The Department of Energy on Saturday authorized the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to deploy backup generation resources at data centers and other major facilities to limit blackouts. On Sunday, DOE issued a separate emergency order allowing PJM Interconnection, the Mid-Atlantic grid operator, to run specified power resources despite limits imposed by state laws or environmental permits.
Calling the storm “historic,” President Donald Trump on Saturday approved federal emergency disaster declarations for a dozen states, mostly in the mid-South. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia declared weather emergencies.
Forecasters said the core of the storm would push offshore and into the Atlantic today, but warned that another surge of Arctic air would follow, locking in bitter cold and icy conditions for several days. “The situation with this storm is pretty unique, just because it’s going to stay cold for a period of time,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Fox News. “This ice that has fallen will keep those (power) lines heavy, even if they haven’t gone down immediately.”
Officials urged residents across the affected corridor to avoid nonessential travel, conserve energy where possible and prepare for intermittent outages as repair crews confront treacherous icing and frigid wind chills. With temperatures expected to remain well below freezing across a vast swath of the East, even minor additional icing could strain weakened trees and lines and complicate recovery through midweek.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
