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A “bomb cyclone” winter storm that devastated the nation on Friday left more than a million US power users without power, wreaking chaos for Christmas travellers and closing down highways and airlines.
Much of the country, including the usually mild southern states, experienced heavy snowfall, howling winds, and air so chilly that boiling water turned to ice in a second.
The National Weather Service said that more than 200 million Americans were subject to weather advisories as wind chills caused temperatures to drop as low as -55 Fahrenheit (-48 Celsius) (NWS).
Jennifer Orlando, 39, and her husband took shelter in Hamburg, New York.
She admitted to AFP that she couldn’t see across the street. “We’re not leaving,” she said.
After a car slid into a power line on the highway, she said that she lost electricity for four hours.
According to tracker poweroutage.us, hundreds of thousands of electrical users who were without power are currently concerned about the severe cold.
Rosa Falcon, a volunteer school teacher, told AFP that in El Paso, Texas, desperate migrants who had crossed from Mexico congregated for warmth in churches, schools, and a community centre.
She said, “But some still opted to stay outside in -15 degrees Fahrenheit out of concern about immigration authorities’ scrutiny.”
Burke Patten of Night Ministry, a charity that assists the homeless in Chicago, said: “We’ve been giving out cold weather clothing, including coats, caps, gloves, thermal underwear, blankets and sleeping bags, as well as hand and foot warmers.”
The Salvation Army has shelter locations open for people to use, according to Major Caleb Senn, the organization’s commander for the Chicago area.
He explained that some of the folks he was seeing currently had only recently become homeless this year.
Some of these people are genuinely terrified. They have never spent a night outside without a place to go before.
However, some people were coping with the icy cold without complaining.
Last-minute holiday shoppers in downtown Toronto, Canada, ignored the freezing cold.
“I suppose every few years we get some huge storms and we just adjust,” said Caledon, Ontario resident Jennifer Campbell to AFP. The way we do things in Canada is in this manner.
Transportation pandemonium
Whiteouts with almost no visibility, icy highways, and blizzard conditions were recorded by transportation officials in North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Iowa, and other states. Residents were sternly advised to stay indoors.
Oklahoma on Thursday reported at least two traffic fatalities. The three were confirmed by Andy Beshear, governor of Kentucky.
Local media reported a 50-vehicle pileup in Ohio that resulted in at least one death, and a nine-tractor trailer accident in Michigan that caused traffic jams.
Even as the country entered the period of the year that is often its busiest for travel, drivers were advised not to hit the roads.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul stated at a press conference that “this is an epic, statewide hazard.”
Your tyres cannot manage the ice skating rink-like conditions on the roads.
Flight tracking website FlightAware reports that some 5,000 US flights were cancelled and another 7,600 were delayed on Friday, many at major international airports in New York, Seattle, and Chicago’s O’Hare.
Even passengers landing in sunny Los Angeles were suffering from the knock-on effects.
According to Christine Lerosen, she was unable to book a ticket out of Vancouver, as reported by ABC 7.
I had to arrange for my brother to drive me to Seattle in order to schedule a flight from there to Denver and then here. My flights from Denver to Seattle were delayed, and now my stuff has been lost,” she said.
After the storm’s air pressure drastically dropped over the course of a day on Friday afternoon, it was designated a “bomb cyclone.”
Bomb cyclones bring about a lot of rain or snow. Additionally, they have the ability to produce hurricane-force winds and flood coastlines.
While winds gusted to 74 miles per hour (120 kilometres per hour) in Ohio’s Fairport Harbor, meteorologist Kelsey McEwen in Toronto tweeted that waves up to 26 feet (eight metres) high have been reported in Lake Erie.
quick frostbite
The weather was exceedingly dangerous, according to Rich Maliawco, the lead forecaster for the NWS in Glasgow, Montana, where the wind chill dropped to -60 degrees Fahrenheit overnight.
People posted videos of themselves completing the “boiling water challenge,” in which boiling water is flung into the air and immediately freezes.
We made our own cloud at -17°F (-27°C) at the #Missoula International Airport, according to a tweet from Montana’s NWS Missoula.
