By KATE BRUMBACK and JULIE WALKER
A massive winter storm continued Sunday morning, dumping sleet, freezing rain and snow across the southern United States and into New England, causing frigid temperatures, widespread power outages and dangerous road conditions.
Ice and snow are expected to continue through Monday across much of the country, followed by very low temperatures, causing “dangerous impacts to travel and infrastructure” to persist for several days, the National Weather Service reported.
Heavy snow was forecast from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast, while “catastrophic ice accumulation” threatened from the Lower Mississippi Valley to the Mid-Atlantic and Southeast.
“It is a unique storm in the sense that it is very extensive,” meteorologist Allison Santorelli of the National Weather Service said in a telephone interview. “It was affecting areas from New Mexico and Texas to New England, so we’re talking about an area of about 2,000 miles (3,218 kilometers).”
As of Sunday morning, about 213 million people were under some type of winter weather warning, he said. The number of customers without power was approaching 840,000, according to poweroutage.us, and the number continued to rise.
Tennessee was the hardest hit state, with more than 300,000 customers without service, and Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi reported more than 100,000 customers in the dark.
More than 10,000 flights had already been canceled by Sunday and another 8,000 had been delayed, according to flight tracker flightaware.com. The most affected airports so far are those in Philadelphia, Washington, Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina, New York and New Jersey.
At Philadelphia International Airport, interior screens recorded dozens of canceled flights and few vehicles could be seen arriving Sunday morning.
Even once the ice and snow stop falling, the danger will continue, Santorelli warned.
“Behind the storm, it will simply be bitterly cold across virtually the eastern two-thirds of the nation, east of the Rocky Mountains,” he stressed. That means ice and snow won’t melt as quickly, which could hamper some efforts to restore power and other infrastructure.
President Donald Trump had approved emergency declarations for at least a dozen states by Saturday, and more are expected. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) prepositioned supplies, personnel and search and rescue equipment in several states, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said.
In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani reported that at least five people died due to plummeting temperatures on Saturday, before heavy snowfall arrived.
“Although it is still early to determine the causes of death, it is a reminder that every year New Yorkers succumb to the cold,” he wrote in X. “The danger of this weather is undeniable.”
The Democrat also announced that Monday will be a day of remote classes for students in the country’s largest school system.
Ice accumulations of half an inch or more are reported in Nashville and the surrounding area, with icicles hanging from power lines and overburdened tree branches falling to the ground.
“Typically we say once you start to see about a half inch of ice, that’s when you start to see more widespread power outages,” Santorelli said.
Police in Oxford, Mississippi, used social media on Sunday morning to urge people to stay home, given the serious danger of being outside. Local utility crews also suspended operations overnight.
“Due to life-threatening conditions, Oxford Utilities has made the difficult decision to remove our crews from the road overnight,” the utility posted on Facebook early Sunday morning.
“The situation is currently too dangerous to continue,” he explained. “Trees break and fall around our workers when they are on top of the trucks. We simply can’t clear the power lines faster than the branches fall.”
Icy roads also made travel dangerous in North Georgia.
“You know things are bad when Waffle House is closed!!!” Cherokee County Police posted on Facebook with a photo of a closed restaurant. The fact that the chain’s restaurants are open has become an informal way to measure the severity of climate disasters in the South – known as the Waffle House Index.
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Brumback reported from Atlanta. Walker from New York. Kristin Hall and Jonathan Mattise from Nashville. Jeff Martin contributed to this report from Kennesaw, Georgia.
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This story was translated from English by an AP editor with the help of a generative artificial intelligence tool.
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