30 dead in US winter storm
Many in the United States faced another night of below-freezing temperatures and no electricity after a colossal winter storm heaped more snow on Monday on the Northeast and kept parts of the South coated in ice. At least 30 deaths were reported in states afflicted with severe cold.
Deep snow—over a foot (30 centimeters) extending in a 2,100-kilometer (1,300-mile) swath from Arkansas to New England—halted traffic, canceled flights and triggered wide school closures on Monday. The National Weather Service said areas north of Pittsburgh got up to 50 centimeters (20 inches) of snow and faced wind chills as low as minus 31 degrees Celsius (minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit) late Monday into Tuesday.
Bitter cold
The bitter cold afflicting two-thirds of the United States wasn’t going away. The weather service said on Monday 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.
A 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.
Thousands without power
There were still more than 560,000 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. Officials warned that it could take days for power to be restored.
In Mississippi, officials scrambled to get 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, Gov. Tate Reeves said on Monday evening.
‘Like a tornado’
The University of Mississippi, where most students hunkered down without power on Monday, canceled classes for the entire week as its Oxford campus remained coated in treacherous ice. Oxford 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.”
