HUGE ICE STORM FREEZES U.S., SNARLS TRAVEL
Winter weather brought ice to a wide swath of the United States on Tuesday, canceling more than 1,700 flights nationwide and snarling highways. At least two people died on slick roads in Texas and two law officers in the state were seriously injured, including a deputy who was pinned under a truck, authorities said.
As the ice storm advanced eastward on Tuesday, watches and warnings stretched from the western heel of Texas all the way to West Virginia. Several rounds of mixed precipitation — including freezing rain and sleet — were in store for many areas through today, meaning some regions could be hit multiple times, the federal Weather Prediction Center warned.
Emergency responders rushed to hundreds of auto collisions across Texas and Gov. Greg Abbott urged people to stay off the roads.
Authorities said one person in Austin was killed in a predawn pileup Tuesday. A 45-year-old man also died Monday night after his SUV slid into a highway guardrail near Dallas in slick conditions and rolled down an embankment, according to the Arlington Police Department.
More than 900 flights to or from major U.S. airport hub Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and more than 250 to or from Dallas Love Field were canceled or delayed Tuesday, according to the tracking service FlightAware. At Dallas-Fort Worth, more than 50 percent of Tuesday’s scheduled flights had been canceled by Tuesday afternoon.
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines canceled more than 560 flights Tuesday and delayed more than 350 more, FlightAware reported.
About 7,000 power outages in Texas were reported as of late Tuesday morning, Abbott said following a briefing in Austin on the worsening conditions. He emphasized the outages were due to factors such as ice on power lines or downed trees, and not the performance of the Texas power grid, which buckled for days during a deadly winter storm in 2021.
Fleets of emergency vehicles were fanned out among 1,600 roads impacted by the freeze.
As the ice and sleet enveloped Memphis, Tenn., Memphis-Shelby County Schools announced that it will cancel classes today due to freezing rain and hazardous road conditions. The school system has about 100,000 students.
In Arkansas, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency Tuesday because of the ice storm. In her declaration, Sanders cited the “likelihood of numerous downed power lines” and said road conditions have created a backlog of deliveries by commercial drivers.
The storm began Monday as part of an expected “several rounds” of wintry precipitation through today, according to National Weather Service meteorologist Marc Chenard.
The weather service issued a winter storm warning for a large swath of Texas and parts of southeastern Oklahoma and an ice storm warning across the midsection of Arkansas into western Tennessee. A winter weather advisory was in place in much of the remainder of Arkansas and Tennessee and into much of Kentucky, West Virginia and southern parts of Indiana and Ohio.