and leaves thousands without power



The prolonged winter storm that brought heavy snow, high winds and brutal cold to most of the US this past week has killed at least 26 people and left hundreds of thousands without power.

Perhaps the worst impact was around Buffalo, New York, where 43 inches of snow fell as of Sunday morning, according to the National Weather Service. The snowfall and blizzard conditions made roads impassable, froze power substations and left at least seven people dead,

Erie County officials said.And the danger is not over yet.“I don’t want to say that this is going to be it because that would be a fallacy for me to say that, because we know that there are people who have been stuck in cars for more than two days,” Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said Sunday.

“There are people in homes who are below freezing temperatures.”Over the past week, this winter storm brought dangerously cold temperatures, blizzard conditions and coastal flooding to almost the entirety of the US, wrecking Christmas plans along the way.More than 55 million people remain under wind chill alerts Sunday morning, and freeze warnings are in effect across the South.

The blizzard conditions persisted Sunday across the Great Lakes, while frigid cold temperatures gripped the eastern two-thirds of the country.Some major cities in the Southeast, Midwest and East Coast recorded their coldest Christmas in decades.

In Florida, it will be the coldest December 25 since 1983 for Miami, Tampa, Orlando and West Palm Beach.

New York City also saw record cold temperatures on Christmas Eve at several locations, including its JFK and LaGuardia airports.

The high at Central Park was 15 degrees, marking it the second-coldest December 24 in at least 150 years, according to the National Weather Service.

Temperatures are forecast to rebound later in the week with a much-welcomed warming trend with above-normal temperatures.About 250,000 homes and businesses in the US had no electricity service as of about 11 a.m. ET, with nearly half of those affected in Maine and New York, according to PowerOutage.us.

Since the start of the storm the number of outages has at times exceeded a million customers.Two died in separate incidents Friday night when emergency medical personnel could not get to their homes in time for medical emergencies, Poloncarz said Saturday morning.

Details about the third death, confirmed by a county spokesperson Saturday afternoon, weren’t immediately available.“The loss of two lives in Buffalo – storm related – because people were not able to get to medical attention, is again a crisis situation that unfolds before your eyes and you realize that lifesaving ambulances and emergency medical personnel cannot get to people during a blizzard situation,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Saturday.

Hochul said she will ask the federal government “for a declaration of emergency that’ll allow us to seek reimbursements for the extraordinary expenses of all the overtime and the fact that we brought in mutual aid from other parts of the state.”

Last edited by Spunky (12/25/2022 1:06 pm)