A brutal winter storm brought danger to millions of Americans on Christmas Day Sunday as heavy snow and freezing cold gripped parts of the eastern United States, killing at least 31 people from weather causes.
A crisis situation was lived in Buffalo, in western New York, where a blizzard has left the city abandoned, without emergency services being able to reach the areas of greatest impact.
“It’s (like) going to a war zone, and the vehicles on the side of the roads are shocking,” said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a native of Buffalo, where snowdrifts of 8 feet and power outages have been life threatening.
Hochul told reporters Sunday night that residents remained in the midst of a “very dangerous, life-threatening situation” and warned everyone in the area to stay at home.
More than 200,000 people in several eastern states woke up without power on Christmas morning and many more had their travel plans cut short, though the five-day storm of blizzards and ferocious winds showed signs of abating.
Extreme weather conditions brought freezing temperatures to the contiguous 48 US states over the weekend, stranding travelers with thousands of canceled flights and trapping residents in ice and snow-covered homes.
Thirty-one weather-related deaths have been confirmed in nine states, including four in Colorado who likely died from exposure and at least 12 in New York state, where officials warned the number would likely rise.
Authorities described historically dangerous conditions in the snow-prone Buffalo region, with hours-long blizzards and bodies discovered in vehicles and under snowbanks as emergency workers scrambled to search for those in need of rescue. .
The city’s international airport remains closed until Tuesday and a driving ban remains in place throughout Erie County, where the lakeside metropolis is located.
“Now we have what will be talked about not just today, but for generations (like) the blizzard of ’22,” Hochul said, adding that the brutality had surpassed the region’s previous historic blizzard in 1977 in “intensity, longevity, the ferocity of the winds.
Due to freezing power substations, some residents were not expected to get power back until Tuesday, with one frozen substation reportedly buried under 18 feet of snow, a senior county official said.
conditions are very bad
The National Weather Service warned that blizzard conditions in the Great Lakes region of western New York caused by lake-effect snow continued Sunday, with “additional snow accumulations of 2 to 3 feet through tonight.”
A couple in Buffalo, just across the Canadian border, told AFP on Saturday that with roads completely impassable, they would not make the 10-minute drive to see family for Christmas.
“It’s tough because the conditions are so bad… a lot of fire departments aren’t even sending trucks out to take calls,” said Rebecca Bortolin, 40.
The displacement nightmare spread to millions of people.
The storm, one of the fiercest in decades, forced the cancellation of more than 2,400 US flights on Sunday, plus about 3,500 on Saturday and nearly 6,000 on Friday, according to the tracking website Flightaware.com.
Travelers were stranded or delayed at airports throughout Christmas Day, including those in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit and New York.
Icy roads and white snow conditions have also temporarily closed some of the nation’s busiest transportation routes, including Interstate 70, which runs across the country.
Drivers have been warned not to hit the road, even as the country has reached the busiest time of year.
Extreme weather has severely impacted power grids, and several electricity providers have urged millions of people to cut back on consumption to minimize blackouts in places like North Carolina and Tennessee.
At one point on Saturday, nearly 1.7 million customers were without power due to the biting cold, according to poweroutage.us.
The number dropped sharply on Sunday afternoon, though more than 70,000 customers in the eastern states were still without power.
In British Columbia (Canada), a bus overturned on Saturday, apparently caused by ice, left four dead and 53 hospitalized, two of them in critical condition early on Sunday.
Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people lost power in Ontario and Quebec, many flights were canceled in major cities, and passenger rail service between Toronto and Ottawa was suspended.
