In freezing Florida, it rains frozen iguanas!
Coldest snap on record in US kills 18 people and hits wildlife too
IT’S so cold in Florida that iguanas are falling from their perches in suburban trees.
It sounds like a joke, but temperatures there have dipped below 5C – which is low enough to immobilise green iguanas common in Miami, and the reptiles have been pictured lying belly-up next to swimming pools and even in the road.
The cold-blooded creatures get sluggish when temperatures dip to 10C and below that, they can’t move at all, said Kristen Sommers of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
They can still breathe and will start moving again once the temperature rises, so anyone finding one has been advised to leave it alone in case it bites on waking. The cold weather has been causing disruption throughout the country.
In New York, street crews dug out snow-clogged roads after a powerful blizzard, with temperatures set to plunge further during a brutal cold spell that has already killed at least 18 people.
From Baltimore to Caribou, Maine, workers battled to clear snow and ice as wind chills were forecast to fall as low as -40C in some areas after sundown, according to the National Weather Service.
In the latest fatality blamed on the harsh conditions, a driver slid off an icy road, killing a pedestrian, early yesterday in North Charleston, South Carolina, city officials said. The teenage driver was arrested on charges of going too fast for conditions and driving without a licence, local news media said, citing police. Forecasters were warning that the fierce cold will reach from New England to the Midwest and down to the Carolinas, adding that lowtemperature records could be broken across the region over the coming days.
In much of New England yesterday, there were intense wind chills, said Dan Pydynowski, a meteorologist with private forecasting service AccuWeather.
‘It can be very dangerous,’ Mr Pydynowski said. ‘Any kind of exposed skin can freeze in a couple of minutes.’ Wind chill describes the combined effect of wind and low temperatures on bare skin.
There were noticeably fewer tourists yesterday afternoon in New York City’s Times Square, which is usually thronged with visitors from around the world.
In Washington, bundled-up tourists ventured onto the frozen Reflecting Pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial before being shooed away by a National Park Service ranger. The storm that swept in on Thursday with gusts of more than 113kph, dumped 30cm or more of snow throughout the region, including Boston and parts of New Jersey and Maine, before ending early yesterday.
In Chicago, where freezing winter weather is a regular occurrence, the temperature has been below -6C for 11 straight days – and if that continues today, it will equal the longest such stretch since records began, alongside 1936 and 1895.
The weather has been blamed for at least 18 deaths in the past few days, including four in North Carolina traffic accidents and three in Texas.
New York’s John F. Kennedy International and La Guardia airports resumed flights yesterday after closing during whiteout conditions the day before. More than 1,300 flights were cancelled by yesterday afternoon, most of them at the New York area’s three major airports and Boston’s Logan.
Nearly 500 members of the National Guard were activated to assist with the emergency response along the East Coast, including 200 in New York state.