A deadly storm system lashed a large swath of the southern US with bands of sleet and snow for a third day on Wednesday, grounding an additional 2,300 flights, leaving hundreds of thousands without power, forcing school closures and making already treacherous driving conditions worse.
Watches and warnings about wintry conditions were issued for an area stretching Texas’ border with Mexico through Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, and into western Tennessee and northern Mississippi.
Several rounds of mixed precipitation, including freezing rain and sleet, were in store for many areas throughout the day, meaning some places could get hit multiple times, forecasters said.
Photo: AP
“It actually looks like it’s going to be getting worse again across Texas, it is already a pretty big area of freezing rain across western and southwestern Texas,” said Bob Oravec, a US National Weather Service forecaster based in Camp Springs, Maryland.
Oravec said that the icy weather was expected to move northeastward across parts of Oklahoma and Arkansas into western Tennessee and northern Mississippi before it starts to dissipate.
By late Wednesday morning, 2,300 flights had been canceled in the US, including three-quarters of flights at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and more than two-thirds at Dallas Love Field, flight tracking service FlightAware.com said.
Photo: AFP
Dallas-Forth Worth International is American Airlines’ biggest hub, and Love Field is a major base for Southwest Airlines.
Many flights were also canceled at other airports, including in San Antonio, Texas, Austin, Texas, and Nashville, Tennessee, compounding frustrations caused by nearly 2,000 cancelations on Tuesday and about 1,100 on Monday.
Many schools throughout Arkansas announced they would be closed yesterday. School systems in Dallas, Austin and Memphis, Tennessee, also canceled classes.
In Texas, more than 350,000 customers were without power on Wednesday afternoon as trees loaded with ice buckled onto power lines, according to PowerOutage, a Web site that tracks utility reports.
More than half of those outages were in Austin, where the city’s utility warned residents who had been without electricity for 10 hours or longer that lights and heat might not come back on until yesterday.
Overnight low temperatures were expected to fall to 1°C in Austin, with more chances for freezing rain, the National Weather Service said.
Austin Energy asked customers to prepare emergency plans and relocate before dusk if needed.
Texas Electric Reliability Council head Pablo Vegas vowed that the state’s electrical grid and natural gas supply would be reliable, and that there would not be a repeat of blackouts seen in February 2021, when the grid was on the brink of total failure.
Emergency responders rushed to hundreds of vehicle collisions across Texas on Tuesday, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott urged people not to drive.
At least six people have died on slick Texas roads since Monday, including a triple fatality crash on Tuesday near Brownfield, about 64km southwest of Lubbock.
Two Texas law officers, including a state trooper who was struck by a vehicle while investigating a crash on Interstate 45 southeast of Dallas, were seriously injured, authorities said.
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