Low temperatures and blizzards collapse roads, leave thousands of families without electricity and make this Christmas the coldest in the country since records were kept
The historic arctic storm that hits the United States has already claimed 22 deaths. It is the coldest Christmas since records have been kept. With most of the country frozen in freezing temperatures, as low as nine degrees below zero in Washington this Sunday morning, or extremes of minus 40 degrees in the northern states, authorities face a winter episode unknown even in Buffalo, where the season cold lasts until March and the thermometer rarely exceeds zero degrees. Today, the inhabitants of this territory face a thermal sensation of -17º.
It is one of the seven States that have reported the existence of fatalities. It is estimated that two thirds of the US population is under the effects of this cold ‘bomb’, while half a million people remain without power supply (on Friday there were 1.7 million homes) and some 5,000 planes have been parked on the ground . The icy weather will continue for several days, although meteorologists are confident that a truce will begin this afternoon and little by little the storms, snow blizzards and hurricane winds, the worst of the storm, will end.
The authorities confirm this Sunday that, apart from the fatalities, hundreds of people have suffered injuries and traumatisms, mainly due to the numerous traffic accidents registered on the icy roads or falls on the street. The worst of them all happened on the Ohio Turnpike where 46 vehicles collided on Friday evening, with a balance of four deaths. An enormous logistical effort has been necessary to clear the road, impassable for long hours with tens of kilometers turned into something very similar to a scrapyard in which fifteen destroyed articulated trucks stood out.
Rescue services are also multiplied by alerts for symptoms of frostbite and gas poisoning from heaters or exhaust pipes of vehicles clogged by snow. It should be noted, in this sense, that an unknown number of Americans have had to spend Christmas Eve locked in their cars stuck on the asphalt or sheltered in restaurants that decided not to close to give shelter to those who were surprised by the snow. The roads are one of the most worrying elements right now. Despite repeated official appeals for citizens not to get behind the wheel, and the fact that the governor of New York prohibited driving in a large part of the State, the Police believe that hundreds of families and drivers have spent the night blocked on the road, immobilized , in many cases on roads with difficult access. Two of the recorded deaths have occurred precisely because of the impossibility of the rescue services to arrive in time to attend to medical emergencies.
The storm is historic in Buffalo where the snow has hit with great intensity /
All the deaths have been registered in Ohio, the State hardest hit by misfortune, with eight deaths, Kansas, New York and Kentucky (three fatalities in each of them as counted this morning), Colorado (two) and Missouri, Tennessee and Wisconsin, with one death recorded so far in each territory. However, the authorities fear that the lethal balance will increase as the hours go by in the presumable circumstance that the brutal drop in temperatures has trapped many people outdoors, unprotected or in abandoned buildings in the case of the homeless. Press agencies report that some 315,000 homes and businesses are without electricity. Although normality is returning little by little, among the few flights that have been able to take off from airports in the eastern and mid-eastern United States since Friday, one of them had to land minutes later after being struck by two lightning bolts, which offers a idea of the ferocity of storms. The aircraft touched down without major problems.
The National Weather Service had already warned as the weekend approached the proximity of this “bomb cyclone”, a “once in a generation” storm. And they were right. The records for the low temperature are unpublished. Given this fact and the increase in electricity demand, several governors have asked the population to ration energy consumption to avoid supply problems in the coming days.
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