US storm causes 10,000 flight cancellations and 1 million people lose power
A massive winter storm immobilized eastern and southern states with heavy snow and ice on Sunday, leaving over 10,000 flights canceled and more than 1 million customers without electricity as far west as New Mexico.
Power outages grew as snow, sleet, freezing rain, and dangerously low temperatures swept across the country’s eastern two-thirds on Sunday. More than 1 million consumers in the United States were without power as of 2:16 p.m. EST (1916 GMT) on Sunday, according to PowerOutage.us, with at least 330,000 in Tennessee and more than 100,000 in Mississippi and Louisiana. Texas, Kentucky, Georgia, West Virginia, and Alabama were among the other states impacted.
The flight tracking website FlightAware reports that over 10,800 flights in the United States were canceled on Sunday. On Saturday, there were more than 4,000 canceled flights.
Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C. reported that all flights were canceled on Sunday. More than 80% of Sunday flights were canceled for a number of airports in major cities, including New York, Philadelphia, and Charlotte, North Carolina, according to FlightAware data. Delta Air Lines (DAL.N) announced on Sunday that it planned to operate on a reduced schedule “subject to real-time frozen precipitation and afternoon storm conditions.”
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The airline said it would send specialists from cold-weather hubs to assist de-icing and luggage teams at numerous southern airports, and it had changed its schedule on Saturday, adding more cancellations in the morning for Atlanta and along the East Coast, including in Boston and New York City.
According to the National Weather Service’s most recent projection, there will be a lot of snowfall from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast on Sunday through Monday morning, with up to 18 inches in New England. It is predicted to rain and freeze in many areas of the Southeast and the Mid-Atlantic.
The storm’s aftermath was expected to bring “prolonged hazardous travel and infrastructure impacts” as forecasters warned of “bitterly cold temperatures and dangerously cold wind chills” from the southern plains to the Northeast.
A significant winter storm covers a considerable portion of the US
State and federal governments announce emergencies.
Declaring the storms “historic,” President Donald Trump authorized federal emergency disaster declarations in South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, and West Virginia on Saturday.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, weather emergencies were issued in seventeen states and the District of Columbia on Saturday.
The possibility of ice could make power lines especially vulnerable, according to experts. “The situation with this storm is pretty unique, just because it’s going to stay cold for a period of time,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stated during the “Fox News Sunday Briefing” live broadcast. “This ice that has fallen will keep those lines heavy, even if they haven’t gone down immediately.”
In an effort to reduce blackouts in the state, the Department of Energy on Saturday issued an emergency order allowing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to set up backup generating resources at data centers and other significant assets.
In the mid-Atlantic area, DOE issued an emergency order on Sunday allowing grid operator PJM Interconnection to operate “specified resources” without consideration to state or environmental permit restrictions.
On Saturday, U.S. electric grid managers increased their security measures to prevent rotating blackouts.
Opening a new tab, Dominion Energy (D.N.), whose operations in Virginia include the world’s largest collection of data centers, stated that the winter event may be among the biggest to impact the company if its ice forecast remained true.
