A dangerous winter storm combining high winds and ice on Sunday swept through parts of the US southeast, knocking out power, felling trees and fences, and coating roads with a treacherous, frigid glaze.
Tens of thousands of customers were without power in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida.
Highway patrols reported hundreds of vehicle accidents, and a tornado ripped through a trailer park in Florida.
Photo: AFP
More than 1,200 flights at Charlotte Douglas International were canceled — more than 90 percent of the airport’s Sunday schedule, flight tracking service flightaware.com said.
Winter Storm Izzy dumped as much as 25.4cm of snow in some areas of western North Carolina as the system moved across the US Southeast, said Brian Hurley, a meteorologist at the Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.
North Carolina Highway Patrol spokesman First Sergeant Christopher Knox said that by midafternoon, the agency had responded to 300 vehicle crashes and nearly 800 calls for service.
Two people died when their car drove off the road and into trees in a median east of Raleigh, North Carolina. The driver and passenger, both 41-year-old South Carolina residents, were pronounced dead at the scene of the crash.
Investigators believe they were driving too fast for the conditions, described as mixed winter precipitation, Knox said.
Durham police posted on Twitter a photograph of a tractor-trailer that slid off the North Carolina Highway 147 overpass in Durham. The truck’s cab appeared to have landed upright on Highway 15-501 below, while the trailer came down in a vertical position from the bridge to the highway below.
Police spokesperson Kammie Michael said the driver was stable with injuries that did not appear life-threatening.
Outages, which had affected 250,000 customers earlier in the day, left about 130,000 customers without power by late on Sunday, poweroutage.us said.
North Carolina was hardest hit, peaking at about 90,000 outages. Parts of Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Virginia and Kentucky also lost power.
The US National Weather Service confirmed that a tornado with 190kph winds struck southwest Florida, saying that it was on the ground for almost 3km with a maximum path width of 115m.
Thirty mobile homes were destroyed and 51 had major damage. Three minor injuries were reported.
Edward Murray, 81, told the Naples Daily News that he was inside his mobile home in the morning when a tornado picked it up and tossed it on top of his neighbor’s home.
“That’s my house that’s turned upside down,” he told the newspaper. “The tornado took me off my feet, blew me toward the east wall and buried me under the sink, refrigerator, kitchen chairs and everything else.”
Murray and his daughter, Cokie, escaped unharmed, crawling from the wreckage.
“I was so happy when I saw the sky,” Murray told the newspaper. “I said to the devil: ‘It’s not going to be today.’”
In Tennessee, there were multiple reports of abandoned and wrecked vehicles on snow-covered roads.
The storm system was expected cause hazardous driving conditions over a large portion of the eastern US through yesterday as the wet roadways refreeze in southern states and the storm turns and moves northward through the Mid-Atlantic states and New England.
“It’s a very expansive storm,” Hurley said. “A lot of real estate is going to get four to eight inches [10cm to 20cm] of snow, and a lot more are also going to get to get some of that ice accumulation.”
New York was expected to be spared most, if not all, of the snowfall, but Long Island and Connecticut coastal areas were expecting gale conditions.
Upstate New York was projected to get hit with up to 30cm of snow, along with high winds.
Fifteen to 33cm of snow was expected in parts of east-central Ohio and western Pennsylvania from Sunday afternoon.
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