Due to the snow storm Fern, hundreds of thousands of points in the United States of America were without electricity, the Reuters agency wrote on Sunday afternoon CET. According to her, the airport canceled approximately fourteen thousand flights. Meteorologists have issued warnings of intense snow, ice and other extreme weather for two-thirds of the country for Sunday and several more days. According to meteorologists, the impacts can be “paralyzing to locally catastrophic”.
Due to heavy snowfall, more than 670,000 collection points ended up without electricity in the US, according to information poweroutage.us. On Sunday after 3:00 p.m. CET, Tennessee reported the most extensive outages, where more than 240,000 customers were without power at the time. Other outages in the order of tens of thousands of subscribers were reported by Kentucky, Alabama or Georgia.
Texas was among the first to be hit by the storm, just before midnight on Sunday CET. There were more than 130,000 collection points without power. Thousands of volunteers distribute warm meals and blankets at pre-selected locations.
More than 120,000 outlets were without power in Mississippi this afternoon CET. This is an eightfold increase compared to the situation in the morning CET, when there were about 15 thousand without electricity. The number of outlets in Louisiana that remained without power has risen to nearly 120,000.
The National Weather Service (NWS) has warned of an unusually large and long-lasting winter storm that will bring widespread and heavy freezing to the southeastern part of the country, where “paralyzing to locally catastrophic impacts” are expected.
Canceled flights
According to flight-tracking website FlightAware, more than 9,900 flights were canceled in the US on Sunday, compared to more than 4,000 on Saturday. The storm caused major complications, for example, in Oklahoma City, where the main airport canceled flights for Saturday and Sunday morning. Major US airlines have warned passengers to be prepared for sudden changes or cancellations.
Delta Air Lines adjusted its flight schedule on Saturday, canceling morning flights to Atlanta and along the US East Coast – including Boston and New York. Other changes concern airline flights to Ohio or Tennessee. The airline said it would move cold-weather specialists to several southern airports to support aircraft de-icing teams.
The president declared a state of emergency in the south and east of the US
President Donald Trump on Saturday called the storm historic and approved federal states of emergency in South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana and West Virginia. “We will continue to monitor the situation and stay in touch with all states in the path of this storm. Stay safe and warm,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
Heavy snowfall is also expected in the northern US. After Texas and Oklahoma, the storm system moved across Ohio and into Virginia during Saturday. Strong frosts are therefore expected in the northeastern tip of the USA.
“We’re expecting at least 8 to 23 inches of snow, probably more. It won’t just be snow. This storm will also bring intense cold. A long period of freezing temperatures that will last into next week,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, a total of seventeen states and the federal district of Washington DC have declared a weather emergency.
In Minneapolis, Minnesota, the mercury dropped to minus 30 degrees Celsius overnight. In this connection, the Fox Weather station published a curious video in which they can be seen frozen spaghetti on the fork, which creates the illusion of the cutlery floating above the plate.
