An arctic blast gripped much of the United States on Saturday, knocking out power to 1.7 million homes and businesses across the country, and leaving millions more worried about further outages. At the same time, it drove flight cancellations, car wrecks, and crippled police and fire departments as plummeting temperatures were predicted to bring the coldest Christmas Eve on record to several cities from Pennsylvania to Georgia.
Temperatures are forecast to top out on Saturday at just minus 13 degrees Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) in Pittsburgh, surpassing its previous all-time coldest Christmas Eve high of minus 10 degrees Celsius, set in 1983, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.
Georgia and South Carolina cities – Athens and Charleston – were likewise expected to record their coldest daytime Christmas Eve high temperatures. At the same time, Washington, D.C., was forecast to experience its chilliest Dec. 24 since 1989.
The flurry of yuletide temperature records was predicted as a U.S. deep freeze sharpened by dangerous wind chills continued to envelope much of the eastern two-thirds of the nation into the holiday weekend.
The freeze has already produced fatal car collisions around the country, with CNN reporting at least 14 dead from weather-related accidents.
The arctic cold combined with a "cyclone bomb" of heavy snow and howling winds roaring out of the Great Lakes region on Friday and into the Upper Mississippi and Ohio valleys wreaked havoc on power systems, roadways and commercial air traffic.
Extreme winter weather was blamed for at least five deaths on Friday.
Two motorists were killed and numerous others injured in a 50-vehicle pileup that shut down the Ohio Turnpike in both directions during a blizzard near Toledo, forcing an evacuation of stranded motorists by bus to keep them from freezing in their cars, officials said.
Three more weather-related fatalities were confirmed in neighboring Kentucky – two from car accidents and one from a homeless person who died of exposure.
Freezing rain and ice from a separate storm in the Pacific Northwest made travel treacherous on Friday.
Border to border
According to the weather service of the Canadian to the Mexican border and coast to coast, some 240 million people were under winter weather warnings and advisories on Friday.
The NWS said its map of existing or impending meteorological hazards "depicts one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever."
With energy systems across the country strained by rising demand for heat and storm-related damage to transmission lines, as many as 1.8 million U.S. homes and businesses were left without power as of early Saturday morning, according to tracking site Poweroutage.us.
The disruptions upended millions of Americans' daily routines and holiday plans during one of the year's busiest travel periods.
The American Automobile Association had estimated that 112.7 million people planned to venture 80 kilometers (50 miles) from home between Friday and Jan. 2. But stormy weather heading into the weekend likely ended up keeping many of them at home.
Nearly 2,000 U.S. flights were canceled on Saturday, with total delays of more than 4,000, according to flight-tracking service FlightAware. More than 5,000 flights were canceled on Friday, the flight tracking said.
The city of Buffalo and its surrounding county on the edge of Lake Erie in western New York imposed a driving ban, and all three Buffalo-area border crossing bridges were closed to inbound traffic from Canada due to the weather.
The severe weather prompted authorities across the country to open warming centers in libraries and police stations while scrambling to expand temporary shelter for the homeless. The challenge was compounded by the influx of migrants crossing the U.S. southern border by the thousands in recent weeks.
Bitter cold intensified by high winds extended through the Deep South to the U.S.-Mexico border, plunging wind chill factors to minus 18 to minus 13 degrees Celsius in El Paso, Texas. Exposure to such conditions can cause frostbite within minutes.