The storm, with temperatures of up to 48 degrees below zero, leaves thousands of planes on the ground, roads cut and large areas without electricity
The Arctic storm in the United States began to reduce its intensity after leaving at least between 22 and 26 dead, temperatures of 30 to 48 degrees below zero in hundreds of cities and fear, great fear, that now, with the thaw and the possibility of rescuers accessing numerous areas blocked this weekend by snow, new fatalities appear. However, the country is still facing intense cold and much more unsettling thermal sensations, emergency energy rationing in thousands of homes and a titanic effort for air normalization, crucial this Christmas season.
The Flight Aware portal recorded 1,400 canceled flights this Sunday, many due to the closures of the Milwaukee (Wisconsin) and Buffalo (New York) airports, a city that is usually cold during winter and that this time has set records never before known. A perfect example of the magnitude of the so-called arctic ‘bomb’, product of the collision of a polar mass and a tropical one that is capable of generating a “once in a generation” storm, according to meteorologists.
The situation in the air sector has gradually improved since almost 6,000 trips were suspended across the country on Friday and another 3,488 on Christmas Day, with the consequent frustration of thousands of family reunions. None of this improvement has solved, however, the gibberish of luggage at airports, with thousands of suitcases accumulated to the despair of their owners.
‘Elliot’, as this “historic” storm has been called according to the National Weather Service, has really been the Grinch in his most chaotic and tragic version. Nearly two million Americans were left in the dark on Christmas Eve, either due to power surges or collapsed power lines in the snow and wind. There were gusts of one hundred kilometers per hour. On the street “it was like having a blank page in front of your face,” some witnesses have explained.
Another indeterminate number of people, but very numerous, spent it in shelters, friends’ houses or refugees in restaurants that decided to stay open all night so as not to leave customers out in the open. The worst could have turned out for those who took the risk or had no choice but to venture onto the icy roads. The governor of New York prohibited driving through Erie County and some of her colleagues advised the same measure in other state territories. But the challenge has been too complicated in one of the festivities with the highest traffic mobility of the year.
In all, Ohio, New York, Kansas, Kentucky, Colorado, Tennessee, Wisconsin and Missouri have confirmed fatalities. Until last night, at the close of this edition, there were between twenty-two and twenty-six deaths, according to the versions of one source or another. Thor’s hammer has struck wide swaths of the Midwest and East. According to the rescue services, most of the deaths have been the result of traffic accidents, but there have also been cases of unfortunate people frozen on the streets or inside their cars, hopelessly stuck on roads under the snow.
Ohio led the tragic balance last night, with eight deaths. Four of them occurred on Friday when 46 vehicles collided on a toll road, in a stretch of several kilometers whose image resembled that of a scrapyard of wrecked trailers and crushed cars. Buffalo, another of the most affected areas, had seven fatalities, all of them located in their homes or on public roads. The authorities do not rule out that “additional deaths” will be discovered throughout today.
The storm is historic in Buffalo where the snow has hit with great intensity /
The same thing happens in other states. Never, since the 1980s at least, has such a volume of the American landscape petrified like this, although 2019 also left a mark of ice, silence and devastation in Chicago or Minnesota. In the Rocky Mountains, ‘Elliot’ left his coldest breath with 48 degrees below zero. They are looking for hikers who, despite all the warnings and police closures, were able to venture into the woods before the weekend. New York asks snowmobile owners to turn them over to rescuers. The emergency services fear that as the blocked roads become accessible again, cars with new bodies will begin to be located. In Iowa they scored -38º, enough to freeze a person in five minutes.
reception centers
Police and firefighters help medical personnel reach hospitals. They have also begun the painful task of visiting homes or searching abandoned places in search of homeless people whom the drop in mercury – up to 20 degrees in an hour – would have surprised them unprotected. However, several New York shelters reported this Sunday how this weekend “we have received users who had never come to a reception center. The fear of freezing has been stronger than their reluctance ». The stations have repeated the alert messages before the braziers or the exhaust pipes that can be blocked by the snow to avoid poisoning.
And there is no light As of noon this Sunday, 173,000 users in Maine, Virginia, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania were still without power. New York, where the National Guard has been deployed, and North Carolina asked the population not to consume more energy than is essential.
There are few places untouched by ‘Elliot’s’ splinters of ice. From Canada, whose government believes it is holding up better because of its long experience in overwhelmingly extreme weather, to Texas and El Paso, where migrants who still have a shred of hope of finding asylum in the US build bonfires and cover themselves with heavy blankets. The arctic cyclone has covered the Appalachians, the Midwest, and large areas of Nevada, Idaho, Utah, Oregon, Wyoming, and warm California. It is now moving “slowly eastward while weakening.” And there is always the miracle of Christmas: in Minnesota, in a blizzard, in the dark, firefighters rescued a one-year-old baby who was barely surviving in a cabin with the help of a mechanical fan.
Two lightning strikes an aircraft in Philadelphia
Passengers on a flight between Philadelphia and Cancun suffered an unusual incident this weekend that reveals the force of the storm that is hitting the US. Their plane, a Spirit Airlines Boeing A321, was struck by two lightning bolts minutes after takeoff and had to return to Philadelphia International Airport. The company reported that the aircraft “landed safely” and all passengers were unharmed.
#Arctic #bomb #weakens #causing #deaths #freezing #Christmas