A historic and brutal winter storm put some 240 million Americans under severe weather warnings yesterday as the United States faced holiday travel chaos, with thousands of flights cancelled and major highways closed.
Africa Today News, New York reports that barely hours before Christmas, during one of the busiest periods of the year, heavy snowfall and violent winds disrupted millions of people’s holiday plans as a massive cold front came down from the Arctic and froze much of the country, even the generally mild southern states.
According to the National Weather Service, 240 million people, or around 72% of the US population, are currently under a winter weather warning or advisory as temperatures dropped as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit (-40 Celsius) in certain areas.
“Winter weather hazards remain in effect from the Canadian border south to the Rio Grande (border river with Mexico), Gulf Coast and central Florida Peninsula while spanning from the Pacific Northwest to the Eastern Seaboard,” the NWS said in a report early Friday.
The warnings appear to be one of the most sweeping sets of US winter weather advisories ever.
Meteorologists said it was so cold in places — 10 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded Friday in normally mild Dallas, Texas — that anyone venturing outside risked frostbite within minutes.
The biting cold is an immediate concern for more than one million customers, mainly in the US south and east, who were without power as of Friday morning, according to electricity tracker poweroutage.us.
Road conditions remained treacherous, even as 100 million people were expected to take to the roads, according to the American Automobile Association.
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Transportation departments in North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Iowa, and elsewhere reported near-zero visibility, ice-covered roads, and blizzard conditions, and strongly urged residents to stay home.
Two traffic fatalities were reported in Oklahoma Thursday, while the Weather Channel quoted the Kansas Highway Patrol saying three people died in road accidents in that Midwestern state, with weather considered a contributing factor.
More than 3,520 US flights were already cancelled Friday and another 1,900 delayed, according to tracking website Flight Aware, many at international hubs New York, Seattle and Chicago’s O’Hare.
US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg warned that holiday travel was being severely impacted.
“To say we have the opposite of cooperative weather would be an understatement,” he told MSNBC, noting that some 10 percent of US commercial flights had been cancelled Thursday, a move that will have severe knock-on effects for travel.
The I-90, a major highway running across the north was shuttered in South Dakota, with officials saying it would not reopen until later Friday.
Holiday travel volumes are expected to be close to pre-pandemic levels, with the busiest day on Thursday, three days before Christmas.
AccuWeather forecasters have said the storm could rapidly strengthen into what is known as a “bomb cyclone” through a process called “bombogenesis,” when the barometric pressure drops and a cold air mass collides with warm air.