Winter storm leaves at least 26 dead in US

(AP):

Many in the US faced another night of below-freezing temperatures and no electricity after a colossal winter storm heaped more snow on Monday on the Northeast and kept parts of the South coated in ice.

At least 26 deaths were reported in states afflicted with severe cold. Deep snow -- over a foot (30 centimetres) extending in a 1,300-mile (2,100-kilometre) swath from Arkansas to New England -- halted traffic, cancelled flights, and triggered wide school closures on Monday. The National Weather Service said areas north of Pittsburgh got up to 20 inches (50 centimetres) of snow and faced wind chills as low as minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 31.6 degrees Celsius) late Monday into today.

The bitter cold afflicting two-thirds of the US wasn't going away. The weather service said that a fresh influx of artic air is expected to sustain freezing temperatures in places already covered in snow and ice. Forecasters said it is possible that another winter storm could hit parts of the East Coast this weekend. A rising death toll included two people run over by snowplows in Massachusetts and Ohio, fatal sledding accidents in Arkansas and Texas, and a woman whose body was found covered in snow by police with bloodhounds after she was last seen leaving a Kansas bar. In New York City, officials said eight people were found dead outdoors in the course of the frigid weekend.

There were still more than 690,000 power outages in the nation yesterday afternoon, according to poweroutage.com. Most of them were in the South, where weekend blasts of freezing rain caused tree limbs and power lines to snap, inflicting crippling outages on northern Mississippi and parts of Tennessee. Parts of Mississippi were reeling in the aftermath of the state's worst ice storm since 1994. Officials scrambled on Monday to get cots, blankets, bottled water, and generators to warming stations in hard-hit areas. The University of Mississippi, where most students hunkered down without power on Monday, cancelled classes for the entire week as its Oxford campus remained coated in treacherous ice.

The US had more than 8,000 flight delays and cancellations nationwide on Monday, according to flight tracker flightaware.com. On Sunday, 45 per cent of US flights got cancelled, making it the highest day for cancellations since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium. New York City saw its snowiest day in years, with neighbourhoods recording eight to 15 inches (20 to 38cm) of snow. Though public schools shut down, roughly 500,000 students were told to log in for online lessons. Snow days off from school melted away in New York, the nation's largest public school system, after remote learning gained traction during the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, bitter cold followed in the storm's wake. Communities across the Midwest, South, and Northeast awakened Monday to subzero weather. The entire lower 48 states were forecast to have their coldest average low temperature of minus 9.8 degrees Fahrenheit (or minus 12.3 degrees Celsius) since January 2014.

In the Nashville, Tennessee, area, electricity returned for thousands of homes and businesses on Monday, while more than 170,000 others awoke bundled up in powerless homes after subfreezing temperatures overnight. Many hotels were sold out overnight to residents escaping dark and frigid homes.