It’s not just in Texas: Icy blast barrels across country, putting 150M under storm warnings
A massive winter storm bulldozed its way across the southern and central United States on Monday, leaving millions of people without power amid freezing temperatures, sending vehicles crashing into one another on ice-glazed highways and bringing blizzardlike conditions to places where snowfall is usually the news from elsewhere.
The storm was notable for its enormous reach — 150 million people were under storm warnings — and for a particularly perilous element it brought nearly everywhere: ice. It left a treacherous varnish on roads across a midsection of the country, including places where driving on ice is a rarity. A pileup in Fort Worth over the weekend, attributed to slippery roads, involved more than 100 vehicles and killed six people.
It was as confounding a storm as it was punishing. Snow blanketed Gulf beaches and people went ice sledding on the roads of southern Louisiana. Alabama was
warned of brutal ice storms in some places and of possible tornado outbreaks in others. Temperatures were lower in Austin than in Anchorage, Alaska.
“It’s snowing in Houston and it’s going to be raining in Pennsylvania,” said Charles Ross, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in State College, Pa. “When does that ever happen?”
After hurtling eastward across the South, the storm was expected
to move into the Northeast. An area stretching from Ohio into northern New England was expected to face ice and heavy snow, with some spots getting up to a foot of snow by Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service. Heavy snow was already falling on Monday in Chicago, adding inches to several layers left in recent days. The forecast calls for a mix of sleet and freezing rain closer to the East Coast.
“It’s a pretty sprawled-out system,” said Michael J. Ventrice, a meteorological scientist with IBM.
There is research suggesting that Arctic warming is weakening the jet stream, the high-level air current that circles the northern latitudes and usually holds back the frigid polar vortex. This allows the cold air to escape to the south.
In places where pipes never freeze, even a light snowstorm can prove dangerous. But this storm was a monster by any measure and it was barreling through a country already facing a litany of other crises.
“The windy storm knocked a tree onto our house, then the wet storm poured the rain in,” said Adley Cormier, 68, whose house in Lake Charles, La., was battered by hurricanes Laura and Delta last summer. With the availability of repair help limited because of “COVID and everything else,” Cormier said, the holes in his house had yet to be fully patched when the snow, sleet and freezing rain showed up.
“This is the coldest that it’s been in my lifetime,” he said. “This is number three of three big disasters for us.”