More than 850,000 people in the United States were left without power and more than 10,000 flights were canceled on Sunday during a monstrous winter storm that paralyzed eastern and southern states with heavy snow and ice.
As snow, freezing rain, and dangerously low temperatures swept across the eastern two-thirds of the country on Sunday, the number of power outages continued to rise. By late Sunday morning, more than 850,000 U.S. customers were without power, according to the website PowerOutage.us, with at least 290,000 in Tennessee and more than 100,000 in each of Mississippi, Texas, and Louisiana. Other affected states included Kentucky, Georgia, Virginia, and Alabama.
More than 10,200 US flights scheduled for this Sunday were canceled, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware. More than 4,000 flights were canceled on Saturday.
Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., reported that airlines had canceled all flights at the airport on Sunday.
Delta Air Lines said on Sunday that it plans to operate on a reduced schedule “subject to real-time freezing precipitation and afternoon storm conditions.”
The airline had adjusted its schedule on Saturday, with additional morning cancellations for Atlanta and along the East Coast, including Boston and New York, and said it would deploy experts from cold weather centers to support de-icing and baggage crews at several southern airports.
The latest forecast from the National Weather Service for Sunday through Monday morning predicts heavy snow from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast, including up to approximately 45 centimeters in New England. Much of the Southeast and parts of the Mid-Atlantic are expected to receive rain and freezing rain.
Meteorologists predicted “extremely low temperatures and dangerously cold winds” from the southern plains to the northeast in the storm’s wake, bringing “dangerous and prolonged impacts on travel and infrastructure.”
Federal and state governments declare states of emergency
Calling the storms “historic,” U.S. President Donald Trump on Saturday approved federal emergency disaster declarations for South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, and West Virginia.
“We will continue to monitor and stay in contact with all states in the path of this storm. Stay safe and warm,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have declared climate emergencies, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, in a press conference on Saturday, warned Americans to take precautions.
“It’s going to get very, very cold,” Noem said. “So we encourage everyone to stock up on fuel, stock up on food, and we’ll get through this together.”
The Department of Energy (DOE) issued an emergency order on Saturday authorizing the Texas Electrical Reliability Board to deploy backup generation resources at data centers and other critical facilities, with the goal of limiting power outages in the state.
On Sunday, the DOE issued an emergency order authorizing network operator PJM Interconnection to operate “specified resources” in the Mid-Atlantic region, regardless of limits imposed by state laws or environmental permits.
On Saturday, US power grid operators stepped up precautions to avoid rotating blackouts.
Dominion Energy, whose Virginia operations include the world’s largest cluster of data centers, said that if its ice forecast holds true, the winter event could be one of the biggest to hit the company.
Source:brasil247.com