US storm leaves 230,000 without power, forces thousands of flight cancellations

More than 4,000 flights were canceled in the US on Saturday ahead of a monster winter storm that had already cut power to more than 230,000 customers as far west as Texas and threatened to paralyze eastern states with heavy snowfall, Report informs via The Straight Times.

Forecasters said snow, sleet, freezing rain and dangerously frigid temperatures would sweep the eastern two-thirds of the nation on Sunday and into the week.

Calling the storms "historic," President Donald Trump on Saturday approved federal emergency disaster declarations in South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, and West Virginia.

"We will continue to monitor, and stay in touch with all States in the path of this storm. Stay Safe, and Stay Warm," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have declared weather emergencies, the Department of Homeland Security said.

"We do have tens of thousands of people in affected states in the South that have lost power," DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said on Saturday. "We have utility crews that are working to restore that as quick as possible."

The number of outages continued to rise. As of 2:44 a.m. EST (0744 GMT) on Sunday, some 230,000 US customers had no electricity, the bulk of them in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee and New Mexico, according to PowerOutage.com.

The Department of Energy on Saturday issued an emergency order authorizing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to deploy backup generation resources at data centers and other major facilities, aiming to limit blackouts in the state.

On Sunday, the DOE issued an emergency order to authorize grid operator PJM Interconnection to run "specified resources" in the mid-Atlantic region, regardless of limits due to state laws or environmental permits.

The National Weather Service warned of an unusually expansive and long-duration winter storm that would bring widespread, heavy ice accumulation in the Southeast, where "crippling to locally catastrophic impacts" can be expected.

Weather service forecasters predicted record cold temperatures and dangerously cold wind chills descending further into the Great Plains region by Monday.

As of 10:21 p.m. EST, more than 4,000 US flights scheduled for Saturday had been canceled, according to flight tracking website FlightAware. More than 9,400 US flights originally set for Sunday also have been canceled.