A winter storm of rare intensity swept across the United States on Friday, causing road and airport closures in much of the country on Christmas Eve.
“More than 240 million people (more than 70% of the population) are affected by weather alerts,” the National Weather Service (NWS) said in its early Friday bulletin.
This great storm, “once in a generation” as the NWS is defining it these days, began affecting the midwest of the country but this Friday it is intensifying and is already spreading to the east, both north and south.
Conditions are very dangerous for traffic, authorities warned.
Millions of people were expected to hit the roads and board flights for the Christmas and New Year holidays, marking a return to pre-pandemic levels of mobility.
However, the specialized site Flightaware recorded more than 3,290 canceled flights. The most affected airports were those of Seattle (northwest), New York, Detroit, Chicago (north) and Denver (downtown).
In addition, there are three regional airports and one international one (Michigan) closed, and several with takeoff operations already stopped, according to data from the Aviation Administration (FAA) website.
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As of Thursday, about 10 percent of flights had been cancelled, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Friday on MSNBC. “Several of the larger air hubs are affected,” he added.
Transportation problems also affect trains and bus companies such as Greyhound, the largest of which has already warned that many routes in the Northeast or Midwest may be canceled or disrupted.
“Please take this storm extremely seriously,” President Joe Biden urged Thursday. “I encourage everyone…to listen to the warnings locally. It’s serious.”
In Oklahoma two people were killed on the road Thursday.
According to the American Automobile Association (AAA), some 112 million people will drive at least 50 miles between December 23 and January 2.
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frozen shores
Several states, including New York, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Georgia, and North Carolina, have declared emergencies.
The phenomenon extends “from the Canadian border to the Rio Grande (on the border with Mexico)”, and from the Pacific coast, in the northwest, to the Atlantic coast, in the east, say US meteorologists.
This low pressure system causes a strong clash between a very cold air mass coming from the Arctic and a tropical one coming from the Gulf of Mexico.
A depression is a system of low atmospheric pressure, often synonymous with bad weather: its dynamics generate updrafts that cause clouds and precipitation.
What makes the current situation extraordinary is that the atmospheric pressure plummeted very quickly, in less than 24 hours.
The weather forecast calls for temperatures as low as -40°C. in the north of the country by noon on Friday and below zero to the coast of Texas.
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Affectations in Canada
Several cold records have already been broken: -53°C in western Canada, -38°C in Minnesota, and further south, where temperatures tend to be more moderate at this time of year: -13°C in Dallas , -8°C in Houston.
This system causes heavy snowfall in the north of the country, especially in the Great Lakes region.
Nearly a million Americans were without power on Friday morning, especially in the southeast of the country (Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Connecticut), according to the specialized site Poweroutage.us.
In North Dakota, the main routes are closed “due to snow and wind, with areas of almost non-existent visibility and ice,” state authorities say, advising travelers not to hit the road in these conditions.
Canada was also bracing for “unusually low temperatures for the season,” with heavy snow and possible freezing rain in some areas.
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Authorities have encouraged Quebec residents, for example, to “prepare contingency plans and bring emergency kits containing drinking water, food, medicine, a first aid kit, and a flashlight.”
The cold has led some people to take up the “boiling water challenge”: they post videos in which they throw very hot water into the air to see it immediately crystallize.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from AFP and Efe
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