A powerful weekend storm left hundreds of thousands without power and plunged temperatures to dangerous lows that are expected to continue in some areas for several days.
While the system is slowly moving off the East Coast, New England and upstate New York could see a few additional inches of snow. Near the Great Lakes, lake-effect snow is expected to linger for a few more days, according to NBC News.
Extreme-cold warnings are in effect from Texas and the Deep South up into the Midwest and into parts of the mid-Atlantic and Northeast through Wednesday.
“Especially in portions of the Southeast, the Mid-Atlantic into the Northeast too, into at least the first week of February,” Allison Santorelli, a meteorologist at the Weather Prediction Center, told The New York Times.
“This is just going to prolong the travel and infrastructure impacts that we’ve been seeing, especially across portions of Louisiana into Mississippi and Tennessee that are without power right now,” she continued.
The weather is blamed for at least 16 deaths: three each in Pennsylvania, Tennessee and Louisiana; two each in Texas and Mississippi; and one each in Kansas, Massachusetts and Arkansas, according to NBC News and local officials.
Around 213 million people were under winter weather warnings Sunday morning, The Associated Press reported.
By Monday morning, more than 820,000 energy customers were without power, according to PowerOutage.US.
Travel disruptions continued to climb Monday. Following 12,000 flight cancellations Sunday, airlines canceled more than 5,000 more flights on Monday, with flight delays nearing 20,000, according to FlightAware.
Freezing rain is expected to continue across parts of the mid-Atlantic, especially North Carolina, southeast Virginia and sections along Interstate 95 stretching up to New York City, NBC News reported.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said during a Monday news briefing that he expects city services to be back in action Tuesday.
“Our goal is for all services to be fully restored by tomorrow, with all streets cleared, students back in school in person and our city back to normal, albeit with a lot of snow piled up,” Mamdani said.
In the South, freezing rain turned roads icy and brought trees, branches and power lines down over the weekend. For Mississippi, it was the worst ice storm since 1994 with officials deploying a record 200,000 gallons of ice-melting chemicals, plus salt and sand to deice the roads, AP reported.
Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves warned Sunday that even as precipitation ends, “that doesn’t mean the danger is behind us.” He urged residents to stay off the roads and check on family and friends, according to AP.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty, we can’t even try to speculate which areas might be impacted or how much snow might fall,” said Santorelli, per The New York Times. “Some of the models are suggesting that some of the locations across the Eastern U.S. that received snow may see another round next weekend, but we’ll just have to keep an eye on that.”
Social media users on X documented the weekend’s lighter side, sharing videos of skiing across bridges and snowball fights in New York City’s McCarren Park.
