The coldest Christmas in 40 years in the Great Plains and Midwest. More than two-thirds of the U.S. population remains on extreme weather alert as a deep cold blanketed much of the country ahead of the holidays, disrupting Christmas vacation plans and leaving more than 1,000,000 homes and businesses without power drift.
Hard freeze warnings were in place for parts of the southern states of Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Georgia. At the same time, CNN, citing weather forecasts, reported that the bitter cold will continue at least through the weekend, prompting experts to talk about the coldest Christmas in at least four decades in the Great Plains (west of the Mississippi and east of the Rocky Mountains) and the Midwestern states.
A gradual relaxation of the dangerous weather phenomena is expected from Monday, with the temperature remaining below zero, but at more “normal” levels for the season.
Forecasters said the Midwestern blizzard had turned into a “bomb cyclone” over Lake Erie and, as it moved east, was expected to drop “blinding” snow from the northern Plains and Great Lakes to the upper valley of Mississippi and western New York state. The Midwest’s “bomb cyclone” — a phenomenon that occurs when air pressure drops drastically within a 24-hour period and accelerates the intensity of a storm — could dump more than 90 centimeters of snow on Buffalo, New York, said the weather service meteorologist Ashton Robinson Cook.
The lowest temperature in the United States on Friday morning was recorded in Havre, Montana, where the thermometer showed -38 degrees Celsius.
“If there’s any good news, it’s that the storm has moved quickly in some areas,” US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told MSNBC. He said many airports, such as Denver, “will be able to get back on their feet quickly” after a “wave” of delays and cancellations, with other hubs, such as Chicago, likely to be able to recover by Saturday.
Extreme weather across the country has disrupted holiday plans just days before Christmas. More than 1.25 million homes and businesses were without power in the southern and eastern United States, with a peak in North Carolina, where more than 150,000 customers were without power, according to the monitoring website Poweroutage.us.
High winds, ice and snow also disrupted commercial air traffic during one of the busiest travel times of the year.
More than 4,500 flights, according to CNN, to or from the United States were canceled on Friday. That included more than 400 flights to and from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport as the Northwest woke up to ice and freezing rain.
The American Motorist Association had estimated that 112.7 million people planned to travel 80 kilometers or more away from home between Friday and January 2, up 3.6 million from last year, approaching the numbers before from the pandemic.
The bad weather, however, seems to dramatically reverse these numbers, although many, like in Utah for example, did not lose their… fun and flooded the ski resorts.
