‘Unique’ winter storm reaches from New Mexico to New England: ”we’re talking like a 2,000-mile spread’

The National Weather Service said ice and snow were expected to continue through Monday in much of the country, followed by extremely low temperatures, causing “serious travel and infrastructure impacts” to continue for several days.

Heavy snow is expected from the Ohio Valley to the Northeast, while “catastrophic ice accumulation” threatens from the lower Mississippi Valley to the mid-Atlantic and Southeast.

“It’s a unique storm in the sense that it’s widespread,” Allison Santorelli, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said in a phone interview. “It’s been affecting areas all the way from New Mexico and Texas to New England, so we’re talking about a 2,000-mile spread.”

She added that as of Sunday morning, about 213 million people were under some type of winter weather warning. The number of customers without power approached 840,000, according to poweroutage.us, and the number was rising.

Tennessee was the hardest hit state with more than 300,000 customers out, and Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi had more than 100,000 customers in the dark.

More than 10,000 flights have already been canceled on Sunday, and another 8,000 flights have been postponed, according to Flightaware.com, which tracks flights. The largest centers hit so far were in Philadelphia, Washington, Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina, New York, and New Jersey.

At Philadelphia International Airport, internal displays recorded dozens of canceled flights, and a few vehicles could be seen arriving Sunday morning.

Santorelli warned that even when the ice and snow stop falling, the danger will continue.

“Behind the storm, it will be very cold across the eastern two-thirds of the country, east of the Rocky Mountains,” she said. This means that the ice and snow will not melt as quickly, which could hinder some efforts to restore power and other infrastructure.

president Donald Trump had approved emergency declarations in at least a dozen states by Saturday, and more are expected to come. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said FEMA had previously positioned goods, personnel and search and rescue teams in several states.

In New York City, New York City Mayor Zahran Mamdani said that at least five people died as temperatures dropped on Saturday before the snow arrived in earnest.

“Although it is still too early to determine the cause of death, it serves as a reminder that New Yorkers succumb to the cold every year,” he wrote on X. He added: “The danger of this weather cannot be overestimated.”

The Democrat also announced that Monday will be a remote learning day for students in the nation’s largest school system.

Nashville and the surrounding area were seeing ice accumulations a half-inch thick or more, with icicles hanging from power lines and overburdened tree limbs crashing to the ground.

“We typically say once you start seeing about a half-inch of ice, that’s when you start seeing more widespread power outages,” Santorelli said.

In Oxford, Mississippi, police on Sunday morning used social media to tell residents to stay home because the risk of being outside was too great. Local utility crews were also pulled from their jobs during the overnight hours.

“Due to life-threatening conditions, Oxford Utilities has made the difficult decision to pull our crews off the road overnight,” the utility company posted on Facebook early Sunday.

She added, “The situation at the present time is too dangerous to continue.” “Trees are actively falling around the linemen while they are in the bucket trucks. We simply cannot remove lines faster than limbs can fall.”

Icy roads also made travel dangerous in northern Georgia.

“You know it’s bad when Waffle House is closed!!!” The Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office posted a photo of a closed restaurant on Facebook. Whether chain restaurants are open — known as the Waffle House Index — has become an unofficial way to measure the severity of weather disasters across the South.

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Brumback reported from Atlanta. Walker reported from New York. Reporting was contributed by Kristin Hall and Jonathan Mathis of Nashville, Philip Marcello in New York and Jeff Martin in Kennesaw, Georgia.