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10,000 flights canceled under winter storm warnings from New Mexico to New England

More than 10,000 flights across the U.S. set to take off over the weekend were canceled as a monster storm started to wreak havoc Saturday across much of the country and threatened to knock out power for days and snarl major roadways with dangerous ice.

Roughly 140 million people, or more than 40% of the U.S. population, were under a winter storm warning from New Mexico to New England. The National Weather Service forecast warns of widespread heavy snow and a band of catastrophic ice stretching from east Texas to North Carolina.

All Saturday flights were canceled at Will Rogers International Airport in Oklahoma City, and all Sunday morning flights also were called off, as officials aimed to restart service Sunday afternoon at Oklahoma’s biggest airport. The airport was nearly deserted Saturday morning, with only a few TSA agents and a couple of travelers remaining inside the departures side.

The Texas Department of Transportation on Saturday posted images of snow-covered highways in the suburbs north of Dallas. Ice and sleet that hit northern Texas overnight moved toward the central part of the state on Saturday.

By mid-morning Saturday, ice had formed on roads and bridges in a third of Mississippi’s counties, according to Scott Simmons, a spokesman for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency.

Little Rock, Arkansas, was covered with sleet and snow Saturday morning, giving Chris Plank doubts about whether he would be able to make a five-hour drive to Dallas for work on Sunday. While some snow was a yearly event, he could only recall three ice storms in the previous 20 years that he had lived in Little Rock, and that potential ice concerned him the most.

Forecasters say damage, especially in areas pounded by ice, could rival that of a hurricane.

“Dangerously cold temperatures and wind chills are spreading into the area and will remain in place into Monday,” the agency said on X. Low temperatures will be mostly in the single digits for the next few nights, with wind chills as low as minus 12 degrees Fahreinheit.

More than 95,000 power outages were reported across the country Saturday morning, about 36,000 of them in Texas and 10,000 more in Virginia. Snow and sleet continued to fall in Oklahoma.

Governors in more than a dozen states sounded the alarm about the turbulent weather ahead, declaring emergencies or urging people to stay home.

After sweeping through the South, the storm was expected to move into the Northeast, dumping about a foot of snow from Washington through New York and Boston, the weather service predicted. Temperatures reached minus 29 F just before dawn in rural Lewis County and other parts of upstate New York after days of heavy snow.


(AP Photo Robert F. Bukaty)
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