Battered US braced for bigger chill as mercury dips to -42F
Warning of record cold temperatures following deadly ‘bomb cyclone’
BATTERED by the “bomb cyclone” that brought heavy snow and flooding to a swathe of the US, Americans were yesterday facing the threat of a big chill.
As workers started shovelling away the mountain of snow, temperatures started plunging.
They plummeted to as low as -4F (-20C) in New England. In Caribou, northern Maine, the wind chill was poised to bring the reading down to -40F (-40C).
According to the National Weather Service, the lowest temperature yesterday of -42F (-41C) was recorded at Embarrass, Minnesota. On the summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire, forecasters expect the biting winds to make it feel as if it was -100F (-73C).
Some parts of the US are bracing themselves for the coldest temperatures on record over the next few days, with the lowest readings expected tomorrow morning.
There are fears that the cold will render useless the grit used to make roads passable.
Experts warned that bitterly cold temperatures pose a serious health risk, with frostbite taking hold swiftly.
“Any kind of exposed skin can freeze in a couple of minutes,” said Dan Pydynowski, a meteorologist with private forecasting service Accuweather.
The cold snap is already estimated to have claimed at least 19 lives. They included four people in North and South Carolina whose cars ran off the road.
In Philadelphia, a passenger was killed when a car failed to stop on a steep snow-covered hill and piled into a commuter train.
Elsewhere, in Virginia, a girl was killed when she was hit by a pickup truck while sledging and a 75-year-old man was hit by a snow plough.
Other fatalities were reported in Wisconsin, Texas, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and North Dakota.
Even the South was not spared. Florida saw temperatures fall below freezing in some parts, bringing snow to Tallahassee, the capital, for the first time in nearly 30 years. This was a novelty in a state where the dusting of snow was marked by the production of a line of hoodies and T-shirts reading “I survived the blizzard of ’18”.
It was all too much for iguanas in the state, who started dropping out of trees, much to the alarm of Floridians who were not used to seeing the reptiles in a state of apparent rigor mortis. It is hoped that they will survive if they are allowed to thaw out.
Drastic measures were called for at the Padre Island National Seashore near Corpus Christi, Texas, where sea turtles were brought inside for their own safety.
Further north, Massachusetts took a battering with the National Guard called out to rescue people in coastal towns after flooding turned some roads into rivers. In Boston a tide of over 15ft broke the record set during a blizzard in 1978.
At one point around 100,000 people on the east coast from Florida to Maine were left without electricity.