More than 100 million people stretching from Texas to Massachusetts are under a warning for winter storms or winter weather advice, and more days of freezing could mean a multiplication of the disturbing stories of hardship.
The stormy cold weather that brought snow blankets and widespread power outages in Texas as well as Oklahoma is expected to move eastward Thursday, bringing a half-inch ice to parts of North Carolina and Virginia, according to CNN meteorologist Taylor Ward. .
A tornado watch is in effect for parts of the Florida Panhandle, southwest Georgia and southeast Alabama until 8 p.m. EST. Washington, DC would be covered with snow, sleet and icy rain by Thursday morning, while New York would see six to eight inches of snow in the afternoon, Ward said.
The weather is not the typical winter cold. Some of those already affected by the storms have spent days without power and water and will probably only see the temperature rise above freezing next week.
Texans carried the heaviest of distress.
One mother told CNN she was considering driving to Mexico to keep her family safe in a hotel. With another freezing point, three options of her children whose insulin spoils, and her child in the autism spectrum with an affected immune system.
“You go to the shelter to get warm, or you stay home, stay cold and stay away from the pandemic,” Sylvia Cerda Salinas told CNN’s Don Lemon.
Again deadly
Continued severe weather means more days of risk of death and injury.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned doctors on Wednesday to be aware of the growing danger of carbon monoxide poisoning and deaths as storms sweep across the country.
Carbon monoxide is a tasteless, odorless gas that can build up when any type of fossil fuel is burned – gasoline, coal or natural gas. Home heating systems are a common source, but the danger is especially great when people turn to unusual sources of heat or power during power outages.
From Saturday to Monday, four adults in Oregon died of carbon monoxide poisoning while trying to stay warm, according to the sheriff of Clackamas County. One person appears to have lit charcoal briquettes inside while three others are hiding in recreational vehicles.
While Kentucky officials responded to calls regarding carbon monoxide, state police reported Wednesday that a 25-year-old Friday was found dead from hypothermia.
Texas lost 16 residents to the weather, while the rest of the toll was spread across Tennessee, Oregon, Kentucky, North Carolina, Louisiana, Ohio, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
Residents seek shelter in their cars
With little available, many families rely on their vehicles to get through the cold.
Another Texan family, standing in front of a house without electricity, chose to drive more than 200 kilometers through snow and ice for shelter.
The normally two-and-a-half-hour drive turned into a five- or six-hour trek, Bryce Smith said. He said the one thing that made the drive from Austin to Royce City possible was that he is from Iowa and knows how to drive in the snow.
“There are no plows here. There is no help at all. You go here and it’s just fresh snow and ice. There is no sand underneath,” he said.
A long wait for the power to come back
Winter storms in Kentucky have “caused physical damage to the infrastructure that transmits and delivers electricity to households,” and some residents did not have power by the end of the week, state officials said.
“We believe we will make significant progress by the end of this week in getting people back to power, but in some areas of eastern Kentucky it could take longer than by the end of the week,” said Andy Beshear, government. , which acknowledged that this was difficult news for residents.
The weather also knocked out aquatic plants in many places, including Marlin, a city in central Texas with a population of more than 5,500 inhabitants.
Cedric Davis, city manager of Marlin, said of the frustration of residents: “They talk to us, call us names, say they do not understand, do not understand. We cried yesterday. We give everything. People are so They understand “I have never seen anything like it before,” the Waco Tribune-Herald reported.
Fortunately, Texas’s power provider, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), said Wednesday that it is making progress in restoring power to the state’s electrical system and hopes local electricity services can return Thursday after rotating outages.
CNN’s Melissa Alonso, Konstantin Toropin, Dave Alsup, Artemis Moshtaghian, Rebekah Riess, Jason Hanna, Steve Almasy, Ed Lavandera, Joe Sutton and Keith Allen contributed to this report.