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Arctic air from a winter storm system engulfed much of the East Coast on Friday, causing power outages and snarling holiday travel with heavy snow, blizzard conditions and dangerously cold temperatures.
It’s the the same system that already has been blamed for several deaths and wreaked havoc on holiday travel plans. More than 5,000 U.S. flights were canceled by 6 p.m. ET Friday, according to the flight tracking website FlightAware.
State officials reported numerous fatalities due to vehicle crashes that authorities have linked to the winter weather. Four deaths were confirmed in a massive pileup involving dozens of vehicles on the Ohio Turnpike. A Kansas City, Missouri, driver died after skidding into a creek, and three others were killed Wednesday in separate crashes in northern Kansas.
Cities across the South, including Nashville, recorded temperatures as low as minus 1 degree early Friday – the lowest Music City has seen in nearly 27 years.
About 150 million people in the U.S. face dangerous wind chills in the days leading up to Christmas, according to weather service data Friday that tracks wind chill warnings and advisories.
“Over 200 million people, or roughly 60% of the U.S. population, are under some form of winter weather warnings or advisories across the U.S. today,” the weather service said Friday morning.
Huge swaths of the nation on Friday felt minimum wind chill temperatures in the negative double digits and will continue to see them in the coming days, according to the weather service.
A weather phenomenon known as a bomb cyclone, essentially a winter hurricane, developed Friday in areas including the Great Lakes, which is expected to worsen blizzard conditions.
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What defines a blizzard? Heavy snow and high winds expected to sweep across country.
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Whiteouts and flooding have left New Yorkers stranded or trapped in their vehicles as the state was hit with a “kitchen sink” storm, said New York Gov. Kathy Hochul during a press briefing Friday.
“It is throwing everything at us but the kitchen sink. We’ve had ice, flooding, snow, freezing temperatures, and everything that Mother Nature could wallop at us this weekend,” Hochul said during the briefing.
Parts of the state have been blasted with snow while other parts faced storm flooding that inundated roads, homes and businesses.
In Queens, a New York City borough on Long Island, police officers were seen pulling stranded motorists out of knee-deep water.
According to the city’s Emergency Management Commissioner Zachary Iscol, police have done a number of rescues Friday but none were life-threatening.
In the western part of New York, the weather service in Buffalo received numerous reports Friday night of people being stranded along roadways amid ongoing whiteouts and wind chills dropping 20 degrees below.
