Millions of people hunkered down against a deep freeze to ride out the winter storm that has killed at least 28 people across the United States.
Key points:
- The storm unleashed its full fury on Buffalo, with hurricane-force winds and snow causing white-out conditions
- Daylight revealed cars nearly covered by massive snowdrifts
- Dozens of people are dead, many feared trapped with power outages keeping communities from getting heat
The storm is expected to claim more lives after trapping some residents inside houses, with heaping snow drifts and knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses.
Stretching from the Great Lakes near Canada to the Rio Grande along the border with Mexico, the scope of the storm has been almost unprecedented.
The National Weather Service said, about 60 per cent of the US population faced some sort of winter weather advisory or warning, and temperatures plummeted drastically below normal, from east of the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians.
Travellers’ weather woes are likely to continue, with hundreds of flight cancellations already and more expected after the “bomb cyclone” — when atmospheric pressure drops very quickly in a strong storm — developed near the Great Lakes, stirring up blizzard conditions, including heavy winds and snow.
Some 1,707 domestic and international flights were cancelled on Sunday, local time, according to the tracking site FlightAware.
The storm unleashed its full fury on Buffalo, New York, with hurricane-force winds and snow causing white-out conditions, and paralysing emergency response efforts.
New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, said almost every fire truck in the city was stranded on Saturday, local time.
Officials said the airport would be shut until Tuesday morning. At 7am Sunday, the National Weather Service said the snow total at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport stood at 109 centimetres.
Daylight revealed cars nearly covered by 1.8-metre snowdrifts and thousands of houses, some adorned in unlit holiday displays, were darkened from a lack of power.
With snow swirling down untouched and impassable streets, forecasters warned that falls of an additional 30-60cm of snow were possible in some areas until early Monday morning, with wind gusts of 65kph.
Two people died in their suburban Cheektowaga, New York, homes on Friday when emergency crews could not reach them in time to treat their medical conditions, and another died in Buffalo.
Four more deaths were confirmed overnight, bringing the total to seven in Erie County.
County Executive Mark Poloncarz warned there may be more deaths.
“Some were found in cars, some were found on the street in snow banks,” Mr Poloncarz said.
“We know there are people who have been stuck in cars for more than two days.”
Freezing conditions and day-old power outages had people in Buffalo scrambling to get to anywhere that had heat, amid what Ms Hochul called the longest sustained blizzard conditions ever in the city.
But with streets under a thick blanket of white, that wasn’t an option for people such as Jeremy Manahan, who charged his phone in his parked car after almost 29 hours without electricity.
“There’s one warming shelter, but that would be too far for me to get to. I can’t drive, obviously, because I’m stuck,” Mr Manahan said.
“And you can’t be outside for more than 10 minutes without getting frostbit.”
‘It’s something I will never forget in my life’
Ditjak Ilunga, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, was on his way to visit relatives in Hamilton, Ontario, for Christmas with his daughters on Friday when their SUV was trapped in Buffalo. Unable to get help, they spent hours with the engine running, buffeted by wind and nearly buried in snow.
By 4am on Saturday, their fuel nearly gone, Mr Ilunga made a desperate choice to risk the howling storm to reach a nearby shelter.
He carried 6-year-old Destiny on his back while 16-year-old Cindy clutched their Pomeranian puppy, following his footprints through the snow drifts.
“If I stay in this car, I’m going to die here with my kids,” Mr Ilunga said.
He cried when the family walked through the shelter doors.
“It’s something I will never forget in my life.”
The storm knocked out power in communities from Maine to Seattle. However, heat and lights were steadily being restored across the US.
According to poweroutage.us, fewer than 200,000 customers were without power by 3pm on Sunday, local time, down from a peak of 1.7 million.
Concerns about rolling blackouts across eastern states subsided on Sunday after PJM Interconnection said its utilities could meet the day’s peak electricity demand.
The mid-Atlantic grid operator had called for its 65 million consumers to conserve energy amid the freeze on Saturday.
In North Carolina, fewer than 6,500 customers had no power — down from a peak of 485,000.
Across New England, power has been restored to tens of thousands with just under 83,000 people, mostly in Maine, still without it.
In New York, about 34,000 households were still without power on Sunday, including 26,000 in Erie County, where utility crews and hundreds of National Guard troops battled high winds and struggled with getting stuck in the snow.
Storm-related deaths were reported in recent days all over the country:
- seven in Erie County, New York
- 10 in Ohio, including an electrocuted utility worker and those killed in multiple car crashes
- six motorists killed in crashes in Missouri, Kansas and Kentucky
- a Vermont woman struck by a falling branch
- an apparently homeless man found amid Colorado’s subzero temperatures
- a woman who fell through Wisconsin river ice.
In Jackson, Mississippi, city officials on Christmas Day announced that residents must now boil their drinking water, due to water lines bursting in the frigid temperatures.
Meanwhile, in Tampa, Florida, the thermometer plunged below freezing for the first time in almost five years, according to the National Weather Service, a drop conducive to cold-blooded iguanas falling out of trees.
AP