Crews race to restore power in South with more Arctic air on the way

When a massive winter storm descended on the South to the Northeast over the weekend, Lisa Patterson planned to stick it out at her family’s home in Nashville.

But after she and her husband lost power, trees fell onto their driveway and their wood stove proved no match for the frigid temperatures. Along with their dog, the couple had to be rescued and taken to a warming shelter.

The family was among many across Tennessee and other parts of the South that have fled to warming shelters as crews worked to restore power to hundreds of thousands of households in the face of a new influx of arctic air expected to spur freezing temperatures Tuesday in places already covered in snow and ice.

At least 32 deaths have been reported in states afflicted with severe cold, including two people run over by snowplows in Massachusetts and Ohio, fatal sledding accidents that killed teenagers in Arkansas and Texas, and a woman whose body was found covered in snow in Kansas. In New York City, officials said eight people were found dead outdoors over the frigid weekend.

The National Weather Service had warnings for extreme, dangerous cold in effect Tuesday morning from Texas to Pennsylvania, where some areas were forecast to see wind chills as low as minus 20 degrees. Much of the U.S. wasn’t forecast to get above freezing all day Tuesday, with temperatures plunging again overnight. Thermometers in northern Florida were forecast to sink to 25 late Tuesday into early Wednesday.

The brutal cold lingered after storms over the weekend and Monday dumped deep snow across more than 1,300 miles from Arkansas to New England and left parts of the South coated in treacherous ice.

And forecasters said it’s possible another winter storm could hit parts of the East Coast this weekend.

There were still 550,000 power outages in the nation Tuesday morning, 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. Officials warned that it could take days for power to be restored.

In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves said Monday at least 14 homes and 20 public roads had major damage in the aftermath of the state’s worst ice storm since 1994. The University of Mississippi canceled classes for the entire week as its Oxford campus remained coated in treacherous ice.

New York City saw its snowiest day in years, with neighborhoods recording 15 inches of snow, forcing the nation’s largest public school system to shut down.



A lineman works to restore power to hard-hit Oxford, Mississippi. (AP Photo Bruce Newman)