RALEIGH, NC (AP) – At least three people were found dead early Tuesday after a tornado tore through a coastal town in North Carolina on the rough edge of an explosion of winter weather across the United States. Millions of people were left without power amid freezing temperatures, and authorities warned of treacherous travel conditions in many states.
The National Weather Service said the massive winter storm that overwhelmed a southwestern power grid and immobilized the southern plains carried heavy snow and freezing rain eastward.
The storm system left record-setting cold temperatures setting with warnings for cold winds stretching from Canada to Mexico.
Chicago residents can usually have a tough winter, but one and a half foot (46 inches) of new snow forced Tuesday morning to close public schools in Chicago. Along the normal gentle Gulf of Mexico, cross-country skier Sam Fagg hit fresh powder on the beach in Galveston, Texas.
The worst U.S. outages were in Texas, which hit more than 4 million homes and businesses on Tuesday. More than 250,000 people also lost power over parts of Appalachia, and another quarter of a million were still without electricity after an ice storm in northwestern Oregon, according to poweroutage.us, which follows reports of power outages. Another 4 million people lost power in Mexico.
The Southwest Power Pool, a group of electricity services spanning 14 countries, has introduced the two-hour eclipse to the east of the extreme demand for heat and electricity. The interruptions are said to have been “a last resort to preserve the reliability of the electrical system as a whole.”
The outages forced a Texas province to get more than 8,000 doses of Moderna’s coronavirus vaccine in its arms. The Harris County Public Health Institute lost power at 1 a.m. Monday and the backup generator also failed, Harpa County Judge Lina Hidalgo spokeswoman Rafael Lemaitre said.
Looking for large groups of people in places they would not have to drive to and with appropriate medical staff on hand, provincial officials distributed the doses at three hospitals, Rice University and the jail in the country.
“It feels incredible. I’m very grateful, ”Harry Golen, a 19-year-old sophomore, waited almost four hours with his friends, many of them in the freezing cold, and was one of the last people to get the shots, which otherwise would not be not. students until March or April.
Hidalgo, the top-elected official in Houston, said she does not believe any vaccines will be lost. But the deteriorating conditions also delayed the delivery of vaccines. Officials said more than 400,000 additional vaccine doses in Texas will only be available on Wednesday.
In the apparent tornado in Brunswick County, NC, three people were killed and at least ten injured when it was torn apart by a golf course community and another rural area just before midnight, destroying dozens of homes. Government Roy Cooper said rescue operations continued Tuesday.
“The air was up and there was a lot of pop-pop pop. And the loud thunder. And then it sounded like a train, a freight train passing through. The rumble of a freight train. It was then that all the damage took place, “said Sharon Benson (63). She said her roof was damaged, the garage door was blown off, the windows were smashed and the nearby trees were uprooted.
The National Weather Service’s office in Wilmington, North Carolina, is sending a team to investigate the damage and confirm that a tornado has indeed hit, said Mark Willis, the office’s meteorologist.
Authorities in several states have reported deaths in accidents on icy roads of this weather front, including two people whose vehicle slipped off a road Sunday and overturned in a waterway in Kentucky, police said.
The death in Texas includes that a woman and a girl died due to suspected carbon monoxide poisoning in Houston, in a house without electricity from a car running in a garage, police said. Law enforcers also said that freezing temperatures were likely to be blamed for the deaths of two men found along Houston roads.
With more icy days expected, frustration has arisen over power outages affecting Texas and surrounding states. The increasing demand and loss of some power stations in the cold, saw power outages mostly only in the summer of 100 degrees Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius).
More than 500 people visited one shelter in Houston, but Mayor Sylvester Turner said other heating centers had to be closed because those places also lost power.
Several cities had record lows: in Minnesota, Hibbing / Chisholm weather station recorded minus 38 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 39 degrees Celsius), while Sioux Falls, South Dakota, dropped to minus 26 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 26 degrees Celsius).
In Kansas, where wind cooling in some areas dropped to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 34 degrees Celsius), Governor Laura Kelly declared a state of disaster.
Most government offices and schools were closed for President’s Day, and authorities urged residents to stay home Tuesday as well. Louisiana police report that they have been investigating nearly 75 weather-related accidents caused by a mixture of snow, sleet and ice rain in the past 24 hours.
The air travel was also affected. By Monday morning, 3,000 flights across the country had been canceled, more than half of them in Texas. In Dallas / Fort Worth International the temperature was 4 degrees Fahrenheit (-15 degrees Celsius), colder than Moscow.
The South was not spared. Forecasters said in a Tuesday briefing that Northern Louisiana has the highest amounts of freezing rain from the incoming system, and according to the Federal Weather Forecast, more than a foot (30 inches) of snow was possible in Arkansas.
About 100 school systems closed in Alabama on Tuesday, delaying the opening or switching to remote classes, where forecasters said conditions in some places may not improve until temperatures rise above freezing Wednesday afternoon.
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AP personnel in the United States contributed to this report.