Enormous storm disrupts power, grounds airlines

A deadly winter storm disrupted holiday travel plans and left hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power across the United States on Saturday, as millions more people feared the prospect of further outages.

Across the country, officials attributed at least 17 deaths to exposure, storm damage and car crashes on icy and snow covered roads, including two people who died in their homes outside Buffalo, N.Y., when emergency crews couldn’t reach them during medical emergencies amid historic blizzard conditions.

PJM Interconnection, based in Pennsylvania, said power plants were having difficulty operating in the frigid weather and asked residents in 13 states to refrain from unnecessary use of electricity. The directive covered 65 million customers in all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia and Washington, D.C.

Across New England, more than 329,000 electric customers remained without power on Saturday, with some utilities warning it could be days before power is restored.

The storm was nearly unprecedented in its scope, stretching from the Great Lakes to the Rio Grande along the border with Mexico. About 60% of the U.S. population faced some sort of winter weather advisory or warning, and temperatures plummeted drastically below normal from east of the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, the National Weather Service said.

As millions of Americans were traveling ahead of Christmas, more than 2,500 flights within, into or out of the U.S. were canceled Saturday, a day after more than more than 5,700 flights were grounded, according to the tracking site FlightAware.

The frigid temperatures and gusty winds were expected to produce “dangerously cold wind chills across much of the central and eastern U.S. this holiday weekend,” the weather service said, adding that the conditions “will create a potentially life-threatening hazard for travelers that become stranded.”

Carolyn Thompson/Associated Press A resident of Buffalo, N.Y., clears snow from a walkway after the city was blasted by blizzard conditions. Freezing temperatures stretched from the Gulf to New England on Christmas Eve.