By Blake Brittain and Eric Cox
WASHINGTON/TULSA, Oklahoma Jan 26 (Reuters) – Tens of millions of Americans hunkered down on Monday or ventured out to help neighbors under bitter cold, blizzards of snow and lashings of freezing rain from a huge winter storm that paralyzed the eastern United States.
From New York and Massachusetts in the northeast to Texas and North Carolina in the south, roads were frozen slick with ice and buried under often more than a foot of snow.
In some southern states, residents faced winter conditions unseen in those areas for decades, with inch-thick ice coating branches, bringing down trees and power lines.
Flights were canceled, schools were shut and volunteers staffed emergency shelters to provide warmth for the needy and homeless.
“I just saw a need for getting people out of the cold,” said Ryan DuVal, who owns a vintage firetruck and was driving it through the frozen streets of Tulsa, Oklahoma, looking for people who needed help.
“You know, just cruise the streets, see someone, offer a ride. If they take it, great. If not, I can at least warm them up in the truck and just get them a water, meal, something. And it’s just giving back to the community like everybody should do.”
Winter storm warnings covered 118 million people. An estimated 157 million were warned to bundle up against cold, ranging from sub-zero Fahrenheit temperatures (-18 Celsius) along the Canadian border to below freezing as far south as the Gulf of Mexico.
DEEP SNOW, THICK ICE
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said she had mobilized National Guard troops in New York City, Long Island and the Hudson Valley to assist with the state’s emergency storm response.
Announcing that schools would be shut for a remote school day, New York City’s Mayor Zohran Mamdani quipped: “I know that this may disappoint some students, so if you do see me, feel free to throw a snowball at me.”
The onslaught of snow, ice and winds hit air travel especially hard, with major carriers forced to cancel more than 11,000 U.S. flights scheduled for Sunday, according to an industry tracking service FlightAware.com.
More than 820,000 electricity customers were without power as of 4 a.m. EST (0900 GMT) across a swathe of southern states from Texas to Virginia, according to PowerOutage.us. Worst-hit was Tennessee, accounting for nearly a third of the outages.
Calling the storm “historic,” President Donald Trump on Saturday approved federal emergency disaster declarations for a dozen states, mostly in the mid-South.
While the storm system was expected to drift away from the East Coast into the Atlantic on Monday, more Arctic air was forecast to rush in behind it, prolonging bitter cold, icy conditions over the next few days, the weather service said.
Still, despite the emergency and the danger, the winter conditions were fun for many, including in Washington DC, where a huge crowd gathered for a raucous impromptu snowball fight in Meridian Hill Park, one man wearing an astronaut space suit.
Families brought sleds to Capitol Hill, where children zoomed down the steep slope below the marble-domed seat of the U.S. Congress.
“It’s beautiful. It’s so fun to go down Capitol Hill. It was great powder this morning. Getting a little sleety now but we’re having a great time!” said a man who pushed his daughter down the hill on a purple plastic sled.
(Reporting by Reuters bureausWriting by Peter Graff; Editing by Andrew Cawthorne)
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