A major winter storm that cut electric power to about 350,000 homes and businesses from Texas to the Ohio Valley was set to leave Pennsylvania and New England glazed in ice and smothered in snow yesterday, forecasters said.
About 30cm of snow was expected to accumulate in northern New York and northern New England, but it was the ice that threatened to wreak havoc on travel and electric service in the northeast before the storm heads out to sea late yesterday and and today, said Rick Otto, a meteorologist for the US National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland.
“Snow is a lot easier to plow than ice,” he said.
Photo: AFP
Even after the storm pushes off to sea, ice and snow were expected to linger through the weekend because of subfreezing temperatures, Otto said.
About 350,000 homes and businesses lost power from Texas to Ohio on Thursday, as freezing rain and snow weighed down tree limbs and encrusted power lines, part of a winter storm that caused a deadly tornado in Alabama, dumped more than 30cm of snow in parts of the Midwest, and brought rare measurable snowfall and hundreds of power outages to parts of Texas.
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 northeast on Thursday.
Along the warmer side of the storm, in western Alabama, Hale County Emergency Management Director Russell Weeden told WBRC-TV a tornado that hit a rural area on Thursday afternoon killed one person, a female he found under rubble, and critically injured three others.
A home was heavily damaged, he said.
Tornadoes in the winter are unusual but possible, and scientists have said that the atmospheric conditions needed to cause a tornado have intensified as the planet warms.
More than 51cm of snow was reported in the southern Rocky Mountains, while more than 30cm of snow fell in areas of Illinois, Indiana and Michigan.
Flight-tracking service FlightAware.com showed that more than 9,000 flights in the US scheduled for Thursday or yesterday had been canceled, on top of more than 2,000 cancelations on Wednesday, as the storm began.
For a second straight night, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport officials mobilized to accommodate travelers stranded at the American Airlines hub overnight by flight cancellations.
Wednesday night, the airport provided pillows, blankets, diapers and infant formula to an estimated 700 marooned travelers, and was on Thursday night ready “to provide assistance in anticipation of customers who may need to stay in the terminals,” the airport said in statement.
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