Winter storm pummels US north-east after rolling through south
North-east residents were urged to stay off the roads with temperatures beginning to drop on Friday evening as a major winter storm turned already slippery roads and sidewalks into ice-covered hazards.
The storm spread misery from the deep south, where tree limbs snapped and a tornado claimed a life, to the nation’s north-eastern tip.
Massachusetts state police responded to more than 200 crashes with property damage or injuries, including one fatal crash, starting on Thursday evening, officials said. New Hampshire state police reported at least 70 crashes on Friday morning.
The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, warned residents to stay home if possible to avoid ice-coated roadways and the threat of falling tree limbs in the Hudson Valley and Capital regions.
“We’re not out of the danger zone yet,” Hochul said. “The weather is wildly unpredictable.”
More than a foot of snow fell in parts of Pennsylvania, New York and New England. Utility crews were making progress in an area stretching from Texas to Ohio after about 350,000 homes and businesses were in the dark at one point.
One of the hardest-hit places was Memphis, where more than 100,000 customers remained without power Friday night in Shelby County alone, according to poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports.
The outages came as freezing rain and snow weighed down tree limbs and encrusted power lines, part of a storm that caused a deadly tornado in Alabama, dumped more than a foot of snow in parts of the midwest and brought rare measurable snowfall.
The highest totals of power outages blamed on icy or downed power lines were concentrated in Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas and Ohio, but the path of the storm stretched further from the south and north-east on Thursday. Some schools and universities across the region closed on Friday as a result of poor weather conditions.
Along the warmer side of the storm, in western Alabama, the Hale county emergency management director, Russell Weeden, told WBRC-TV a tornado that hit a rural area on Thursday afternoon killed one person, a woman he found under rubble, and critically injured three others. A house was heavily damaged, he said.
With many schools closed, an outing turned tragic in Oklahoma, where a 12-year-old boy was killed while sledding on Thursday. Police said on Friday they were investigating the hitand-run crash in the Tulsa suburb of Broken Arrow.
Tornadoes in the winter are unusual but possible, and scientists have said the atmospheric conditions needed to cause a tornado have intensified as the planet warms.
More than 20in of snow was reported in the southern Rockies, while more than a foot of snow fell in areas of Illinois, Indiana and Michigan.
Airlines scrubbed about 3,400 flights by midday on Friday, with the highest numbers of cancellations at Dallas-Fort Worth and airports in the New York City area and Boston, according to the tracking service FlightAware.
In the Pittsburgh area, commuter rail service was halted on Friday when a power line went down, trapping cars at a Port Authority of Allegheny county rail yard.
In Texas, the return of sub-freezing weather brought heightened anxiety nearly a year after February 2021’s catastrophic freeze that buckled the state’s power grid for days, leading to hundreds of deaths in one of the worst blackouts in US history.
Facing a new test of Texas’s grid, the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, said it was holding up and on track to have more than enough power to get through the storm. Texas had about 15,000 outages on Friday morning, and earlier totals came nowhere close to the 4m outages reported in 2021.
Abbott and local officials said Thursday’s outages were due to high winds or icy and downed transmission lines, not grid failures. Power had been restored by the end of the day to more than half of those who lost power.
The storm began on Tuesday and moved across the central US on Wednesday’s Groundhog Day, the same day the famed groundhog Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter. The storm came on the heels of a nor’easter last weekend that brought blizzard conditions to many parts of the east coast.