At least 26 people died from the winter storm in the United States -the fiercest in decades-, and tens of thousands of homes were left without electricity this Christmas Sunday after four days of polar winds that hit the center and east of the country.
The extreme weather, with snowfall and temperatures as low as 48 degrees below zero, caused the cancellation of thousands of flights and made many roads impassable in the busy holiday season of travel.
Erie County, in northwestern New York state, was particularly hard hit.
Seven people died there because of the stormMark Poloncarz, head of this county, said this Sunday during a press conference, AFP reported.
Some fatalities were found in cars and others on the street in the middle of the snow. “It’s horrible, it’s a big catastrophe,” she said.
The US authorities confirmed at least 26 deaths in eight states due to this rare storm that has hit the country since Wednesday night.
Some occurred on roads, very dangerous due to the frozen ground and poor visibility.
US media reported up to 30 storm-related deaths, including four in Colorado and at least seven in western New York.
“We have seven confirmed deaths at this time as a result of the storm in Erie County. There may be more,” Poloncarz told reporters.
“There are people trapped in their cars for more than two days and others in houses with temperatures below zero”he warned.
Between 12 and 24 inches of snow was still expected to fall overnight, according to the latest bulletin from the National Weather Service (NWS).
A travel ban in this region has been in effect since Friday, but hundreds of people were still stranded in their vehicles.
To rescue them, New York Governor Kathy Hochul deployed the National Guard to Erie County and Buffalo, where emergency services were virtually paralyzed.
Power will also not be fully restored to the city of Buffalo before tomorrow, Poloncarz warned, urging residents not to leave their homes as roads remain impassable.
“The winds are so strong” that the snow forms like “sand dunes” is “crazy,” Ali Lawson, 34, who has lived in Buffalo for eight years, told AFP on Saturday.
Nearly 1.7 million customers across the country were without power over the weekend, according to Poweroutage.us.
Some 153,000 subscribers were still without electricity this afternoon.
The hardest-hit states were Maine, New York, Virginia, Washington, and Vermont.
The NWS said temperatures in the central and eastern United States should return “to seasonal norms by the middle of next week.”
Since Friday afternoon, the storm has become a “low pressure bomb”: a collision between two air masses, one very cold from the Arctic and the other tropical from the Gulf of Mexico.
Low-pressure pumps can produce heavy rain or snowfall, coastal flooding, and hurricane-force winds.
Air traffic was gradually improving with nearly 1,500 flights canceled today, up from more than 3,400 the day before, according to tracking site FlightAware.com.
The US aviation authority, the FAA, “hopes the most extreme disruptions are behind us,” US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg tweeted on Saturday.
For many travelers the nightmare continued at the airports in Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Minneapolis and New York.
The icy roads have also led to the temporary closure of some of the country’s busiest routes, including Interstate 70, which runs through much of the United States from east to west.
Cities like Denver or Chicago opened shelters to accommodate the homeless and protect them from the risk of hypothermia.
Canada was also affected by the storm and all provinces had weather alerts.
Hundreds of thousands of people lost power in Ontario and Quebec, and airports in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal saw flight cancellations.
In the province of British Columbia, authorities said 53 people were injured in a bus accident on Saturday night, about 330 kilometers east of Vancouver.
The cause of the crash was under investigation.
