US braces for more freezing cold as winter storm leaves at least 28 dead

Many in the US faced another night of below-freezing temperatures and no electricity after a colossal winter storm heaped more snow on the north east and kept parts of the south coated in ice.

At least 28 deaths were reported in states afflicted with severe cold.

Deep snow — over a foot (30cm) extending 1,300 miles (2,100 km) from Arkansas to New England — halted traffic, cancelled flights and triggered wide school closures.

The National Weather Service said areas north of Pittsburgh got up to 20 inches (50cm) of snow and faced wind chills as low as minus 25F (minus 31C) late on Monday and into Tuesday.

The bitter cold afflicting two-thirds of the US wasn’t going away.

The weather service said that a fresh influx of Arctic air is expected to sustain freezing temperatures in places already covered in snow and ice, and forecasters said it’s possible another winter storm could hit parts of the East Coast this weekend.

A rising death toll included two people run over by snowploughs in Massachusetts and Ohio, fatal sledding accidents in Arkansas and Texas and a woman whose body was found covered in snow by police with bloodhounds after she was last seen leaving a Kansas bar.

In New York City, officials said eight people were found dead outdoors in the course of the frigid weekend.

There were still more than 670,000 power outages in the nation on Monday evening, according to poweroutage.com. Most of them were in the south, where weekend blasts of freezing rain caused tree limbs and power lines to snap, inflicting crippling outages on northern Mississippi and parts of Tennessee.

Parts of Mississippi were reeling in the aftermath of the state’s worst ice storm since 1994. Officials scrambled to get cots, blankets, bottled water and generators to warming stations in hard-hit areas.

The University of Mississippi, where most students hunkered down without power, cancelled classes for the entire week as its Oxford campus remained coated in treacherous ice.

Oxford Mayor Robyn Tannehill said on social media that so many trees, limbs and power lines had fallen that “it looks like a tornado went down every street”.

A pair of burly, falling tree branches damaged real estate agent Tim Phillips’s new garage, broke a window and cut off power to his home in Oxford. He said half of his neighbours had homes or vehicles damaged.

“It’s just one of those things that you try to prepare for,” Mr Phillips said, “but this one was just unreal.”

The US had more than 11,000 flight delays and cancellations nationwide, according to flight tracker flightaware.com.

On Sunday, 45% of US flights got cancelled, making it the highest day for cancellations since the Covid-19 pandemic, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.

More light to moderate snow was forecast in New England on Monday evening.

New York City experienced its snowiest day in years, with neighbourhoods recording 20 to 38cm of snow.

Though public schools shut down, roughly 500,000 students were told to log in for online lessons. Snow days off from school melted away in New York, the nation’s largest public school system, after remote learning gained traction during the coronavirus pandemic.