A sprawling winter storm emptied airports and shut down highways as dangerous conditions upended holiday plans. Nearly 1.2 million customers nationwide were without electricity.
Follow our latest live news updates on the Arctic storm. Big Truck Parts
Julie Bosman, Richard Fausset and Jamie McGee
CHICAGO — A frigid winter storm pummeled the United States for a third day on Friday, leaving more than 500,000 homes and businesses without power, causing crashes and epic delays on ice-slicked expressways and stranding thousands of travelers at airports just before Christmas.
Most of the country shared in the misery whether from snow, ice or subzero temperatures: Roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population — more than 200 million people — were under winter warnings or advisories at one point on Friday. Even New Orleans, famous for its balmy climate, opened three overnight warming centers.
Meteorologists said that the storm was not quite finished. Freezing air was expected to linger through the holiday weekend in the Midwest, Northeast and South. Blizzard conditions could continue in spots around the Great Lakes region for days, including in Buffalo, a city that experienced 70-mile-per-hour winds on Friday. In New York City, wind chills are expected to drop below zero and stay there into Saturday morning.
For many, the cold was the storm’s most enduring calling card.
“It’s cold enough that if you got a walk-in freezer and got in half-naked and sat around for a while, that’s what it feels like,” said Randy Hayden, 70, who runs a 20,000-acre cattle ranch in Gillette, Wyo., where the wind chill made it feel like 45 degrees below zero.
Just as painful was the cancellation of thousands of flights, leaving many weary travelers stuck in airport terminals realizing that they were not going to be home for the holidays as planned.
Sharisse Wooding, 41, a school principal from Memphis, said her flight home from a vacation in New York City had been canceled — and rebooked for Monday.
It was all “a little heartbreaking,” she said, lingering at La Guardia Airport as she tried to regroup. “This is not how I’m supposed to spend my Christmas break.”
Icy, wind-whipped air left residents shivering across much of the country, especially those who are accustomed to mild winters. On the roads, at least 12 people died in crashes likely related to the storm in Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio and Oklahoma, the authorities said.
In Nashville, a layer of ice and snow accompanied by zero-degree temperatures left the city’s normally boisterous downtown relatively quiet, without the usual throng of tourists for the holidays.
Steam rose into freezing air off the Cumberland River as Kyle Elliott, 29, trudged above it on a pedestrian bridge, a guitar strapped on his back. Fifteen minutes into the walk, he could no longer feel his feet.
“I’ve never experienced weather this cold before,” said Mr. Elliott, a native of Tennessee. “I’ve never felt my facial hair freeze before. I have now.”
In Nashville, roughly 55,000 customers across the city had lost power as of Friday afternoon, and state officials issued a plea to businesses and residents to reduce usage and help stabilize the power grid.
Other parts of the country were more prepared for the frozen blasts.
Angus cattle hurried up a pasture trail on Steve and Tara Agan’s farm about an hour south of Des Moines on Friday, eager to feast on silage and alfalfa.
Temperatures there had reached 9 degrees below zero overnight, and wind gusts as cold as 27 degrees below zero whipped snow around them.
“Your eyelashes freeze in minutes out here,” said Ms. Agan, adding that the biggest challenge was keeping her fingers warm, even in thick gloves, while bottle-feeding some of the calves. “But you don’t have a choice. You have to come out. The cows need fed in the winter just as much as they do in the summer.”
Goran Nedeljkovic, 59, a mail carrier in Chicago, said he was surprised that the postal service required letter carriers to complete their routes by foot on Friday.
“I have five or six layers on, so my body is OK, but my fingertips keep freezing through my gloves, my glasses keep fogging up and my scanner isn’t working because of the cold,” he said.
Many New Englanders reacted to the storm with a characteristic mix of stoicism and acceptance, even as downed trees and tidal surges knocked out power and closed roads. At the Landing, a brown-shingled restaurant at the edge of Marblehead Harbor, north of Boston, Dina Sweeney, the manager, stood outside watching the gray water heave and crash through the metal grates and railings at the harbor’s edge, scattering seaweed across the parking lot.
Inside the building, she said, flooding had caused significant damage, buckling the floor, despite the protective hatches built into the structure that allow the ocean water to pass in and out.
“It’s a very angry ocean,” she said.
Power outages rippled across the country on Friday. They were particularly widespread in North Carolina, where more than 60,000 customers were affected as of Friday evening, according to the website poweroutage.us.
Caitlin Linney, an electronic music artist, woke up on Friday at her parents’ rural home in Efland, about 40 minutes northwest of Raleigh, hoping to start her day with a Peloton yoga course, before realizing that they had no electricity.
Ms. Linney’s parents live on a 10-acre property and get their water from a well. But no power meant no water to pump it. So on Friday afternoon, Ms. Linney, who had traveled from her home in Southern California for the holidays, was in nearby Durham, picking up Vietnamese food for lunch — as well as a good deal of bottled drinking water.
The power came back on at her parents’ house by midafternoon, but Ms. Linney was concerned it might go out again, particularly as temperatures were expected to plunge to 9 degrees on Friday night.
Ms. Linney said her father, who is 80, had spent the day chain-sawing fallen trees and feeding the logs into a wood-burning fire.
“We’re going to keep the wood stove on,” Ms. Linney said. If the power went out again, she said, they may have to ask to bunk down at a neighbor’s house.
In Atlanta, where residents are used to the occasional cold snap, Gov. Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency this week, prohibiting price gouging of heating fuels and warning of black ice on the roads.
At Ponce City Market, a trendy indoor-outdoor mall along the Atlanta BeltLine, the city’s recreation trail, most of the action was inside, as shoppers ran errands two days before Christmas.
At an outpost of Marine Layer, a clothing store, Jennifer Velasco, an employee, was waiting on customers in a poofy winter coat and a white wool hat. Every time the door opened, the wind and cold would come in. Ms. Velasco, who moved to Atlanta from Houston a few months ago, was not pleased.
“I hate the cold,” said Ms. Velasco, 35. “It’s the worst. It hurts. Everything is dry.”
Local and state officials scrambled to open emergency shelters for residents who found themselves lacking the basics, serving hot food and distributing supplies.
The weekend weather is expected to dip into the 30s in Central Florida, a worrisome plunge for Keishaun Johnson, who has three children, a dog named Midas and no stable housing situation.
She and her family went to a homeless shelter this week in downtown Orlando, a facility that is doubling as a warming center, to gather supplies for the cold snap.
“We got jackets, blankets, all the hygiene stuff, clothes, socks, everything,” she said. “Now I’m 100 percent better with this weekend that’s coming up, because it was really scary.”
Across the country, airports remained busy with Christmas travelers, but showed signs that the disruption from the storm was beginning to ease.
Lines at Chicago O’Hare International Airport appeared to be shorter than the day before, and some travelers said they were pleasantly surprised at the lack of chaos.
“I didn’t think we’d be able to get in the door,” said Joe Netzel, 40, of Chicago, who was waiting to fly to Phoenix with his wife and 3-year-old daughter. “But our flight is on time.”
Reporting was contributed by Eric Adelson from Orlando, Robert Chiarito from Chicago, Ann Hinga Klein from Des Moines, Jenna Russell from Marblehead, Mass., and Ellen Yan and Sarah Maslin Nir from New York.
In Western New York, the high winds and snow took down power lines across the region on Friday, forcing tens of thousands of residents into the dark — and cold.
Eva Malczewski, 19, a Brooklyn College student visiting her family in Buffalo for the holiday, said their power had gone out around 2 p.m. The electric utility, National Grid, has so far given them no indication when the lights and heat will be restored.
“We can see out our window that our entire block doesn’t have power,” Ms. Malczewski said. “We’re all bundled up. It’s very cold.”
She said her family was relying on a gas fireplace in the dining room for heat and was uncertain what Saturday would bring. “Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve,” she said. “Usually, we go to my aunt’s house. But I don’t even know if we can drive over there with this weather.”
Michelle Hollander, 58, lost power at her home on the west side of Buffalo about an hour later — along with everyone on her street. She and her extended family were huddled in one room to keep warm. “It’s the four of us and the dog,” she said.
Ms. Hollander said her family was using camping lanterns and candles along with a gas fireplace to stay warm. She was grateful to have finished her Christmas shopping before the storm hit. “We’re going to have some drinks, play some games,” she said. “What else can we do?”
There were 96,000 electric customers without power across New York State on Friday evening, according to PowerOutage.us, which tracks electric outages across the country.
Conditions in the western part of the state will make it difficult for crews to restore power swiftly, and high winds will make more outages likely, according to the National Weather Service. The service is predicting blizzard conditions in Buffalo to continue through Saturday. Winds as high as 70 miles per hour are expected at times, and areas of blowing snow will produce zero visibility, according to forecasters.
By just before 7:30 p.m. on Friday, 5,259 U.S. flights had been canceled, the most cancellations on any day this year. On Feb. 3, during another winter storm, 5,257 flights were canceled.
ORLANDO, Fla. — Temperatures were expected to drop into the 20s this weekend in Orlando, creating anxiety among some residents accustomed to seeing the thermometer some 30 degrees higher at this time of year.
“I was scared,” said Keishaun Johnson, as she, her three children and their dog stood across the street from the city’s Coalition for the Homeless, which is serving as a warming center this weekend for those who need it.
The city provided the family with “jackets, blankets, all the hygiene stuff, clothes, socks, everything,” Ms. Johnson, 26, said. “Now I’m 100 percent better with this weekend that’s coming up, because it was really scary.”
Ms. Johnson and her family plan to spend the weekend at the shelter, which, along with three others in the city, will be available for residents who need a warm place to go through Monday morning, when temperatures are expected to return to a more seasonal mid-50s. Orange County, which includes Orlando, is offering free bus rides to the centers.
As of Friday afternoon, the temperature had not yet fallen, and a couple of miles away, in the neighborhood of Delaney Park, a group of high school boys, one of them shirtless, played pickup football.
“I’m a big cold weather guy,” one of the boys, Dylan Cannella, 17, said. “I say, ‘cold weather,’ but it’s like 50 degrees, at the lowest.”
It was, at the moment, 64.
More than 13,000 U.S. flights had been disrupted by early Friday evening, after about 11,000 disruptions on Thursday, according to FlightAware, a website that tracks flight data.
Mark Woodley really did not want to go to work on Thursday, and he wasn’t afraid to tell you.
Mr. Woodley, a sports anchor and reporter for KWWL, an NBC News affiliate in Eastern Iowa, was pressed into service as the massive storm system moved across the plains. Temperatures plunged to 12 degrees in the morning and continued to drop, and it was snowing — heavily at times — as Mr. Woodley broadcast live from the streets of Waterloo for more than three hours.
“What better time to ask the sports guy to come in about five hours earlier than he would normally wake up, go stand out in the wind and the snow and the cold and tell other people not to do the same?” Mr. Woodley told Ryan Witry, an anchor who was back in the warm, dry studio. “I didn’t realize that there was a 3:30 also in the morning until today.”
This is what you get when you ask the sports guy to come in to cover a blizzard in the morning show. pic.twitter.com/h0RL9tVQqg
One grown man’s full-throated irritation was a gift to the internet that kept on giving.
As Mr. Witry continued to check in over the course of the morning, Mr. Woodley became increasingly annoyed.
“Tune in for the next couple hours to watch me progressively get crankier and crankier,” he said, before bemoaning missing an assignment that would have kept him inside a car.
“How do I get that Storm Chaser 7 duty?” he asked. “That thing is heated, the outdoors currently is not heated.”
As the minutes and hours passed, his efforts to enunciate became more strained.
“The good news is that I can still feel my face right now,” he said. “The bad news is that I kind of wish I couldn’t.”
And as the sun began to rise, Mr. Woodley wondered aloud if the joke was on him.
“Can I go back to my regular job? I’m pretty sure, Ryan, you guys added an extra hour to the show just because somebody likes torturing me,” he said. “Compared to two and a half hours ago it is just getting colder and colder.”
He signed off at daybreak — “thankfully for the last time this morning” — with large piles of snow behind him.
In an interview, Mr. Woodley, who has worked at KWWL on and off for 20 years, said that the previous 24 hours had “been insane” and that the response had been overwhelmingly positive, including from his employer.
“The whole thing was incredible, I don’t understand how celebrities do anything,” he said. “It’s exhausting. I love it because it’s something new for me, but I never saw anything like this coming.”
Mr. Woodley said he did 14 live stand-ups over the course of three and a half hours but selected the funniest parts to splice together “like a trailer for a terrible comedy” and post on social media. He originally posted the montage to his personal Facebook page, but his friends and family encouraged him to put it on Twitter. The next thing he knew, the director Judd Apatow and the actor Josh Gad were retweeting him.
While Mr. Woodley was a little worried that he’d get in trouble with his bosses at the station, he said “they know who I am on air,” and adding a little snark and sarcasm was not out of character. The station has been “completely onboard,” he said.
Mr. Woodley managed to talk his way out of doing a second round of coverage on Friday morning and instead planned to return to his regular 6 p.m. time slot to preview the Music City Bowl in which the University of Iowa will play the University of Kentucky in Nashville next weekend.
“I was excited to not be that guy again, and if the good Lord is willing I will never do it again,” he said. However, if his team is short-handed, as was the case this week, he said he would grudgingly step in.
As a local reporter, Mr. Woodley said he imagined making it “big” someday.
“Being known for being the crotchety old sports and weather guy was not on the list,” he said, “but it is what it is.”
Vanessa Vogelpohl, a Californian visiting relatives in frigid Nashville, walked into the warmth of a diner with her family on Friday afternoon and asked, “What happens if your eyeballs freeze?”
Not a bad question when the thermometer is in the single digits in the daytime. And not a bad encapsulation of the range of feeling experienced by Americans in the path of this week’s bomb cyclone and its frightful cold. There was some humor in Ms. Vogepohl’s question, but also a generous dollop of respect for a force of nature indifferent to human suffering — not to mention the human preference for the cozy comfort Danes call hygge.
“I have five or six layers on, so my body is OK. But my fingertips keep freezing through my gloves, my glasses keep fogging up, and my scanner isn’t working because of the cold,” said Goran Nedeljkovic, 59, who had the misfortune on Friday of being employed as a Chicago mail carrier.
“It’s cold enough that, if you got a walk-in freezer and got in half-naked and sat around for a while, that’s what it feels like,” said Randy Hayden, 70, who runs a 20,000-acre cattle ranch in Gillette, Wyo., where the wind chill made it feel like minus 45 degrees.
It’s tough to call a snow day and skip work when you run a ranch in Wyoming. The cows will not water and feed themselves. But this was not Mr. Hayden’s first rodeo. He trudged off to work on Friday in long underwear below two pairs of Wranglers, plus coveralls, topping those off with leather chaps. He wore two layers of gloves and carried another pair in case those got damp.
The key, Mr. Hayden said, is leaving almost no bare skin exposed to the elements. Exposing fingers, or worse, touching metal, is brutal: “It’s like sticking yourself in the finger with a pin, or hitting yourself on the thumb with a hammer.”
For Cheyenne Pratt, a resident of Key West, Fla., who was also visiting Nashville, the cold was a welcome novelty. “I’m enjoying this day even though I can’t feel my legs,” said Ms. Pratt, 47, who was walking along Nashville’s touristy Broadway strip. She wore a coat and thick scarf, but neglected to pack gloves.
Another visitor to Nashville, Jake Callahan of Illinois, played the role of Midwestern stoic in the face of the Southern chill. “It’s kind of like another day,” Mr. Callahan said, echoing the sentiments of generations of shirtless dudes at Bears games.
So can your eyeballs really freeze? Google provides answers, like this one from the website of Grosinger, Spigelman & Grey, an eye-care practice in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.: “Not really, BUT it is ill-advised to force your eyes open in excessively frigid temperatures, especially with gusty winds as your cornea can freeze or your contact lenses can freeze to your eyeball.”
They should know. In Bloomfield Hills, it was 4 degrees and snowing on Friday afternoon.
Robert Chiarito, Sarah Maslin Nir and Jamie McGee contributed reporting.
Travel bans have been extended across Western New York. In Erie, Genesee, Niagara and Orleans counties, roads are closed to all but emergency vehicles, according to the governor’s office. Over 110,000 customers are currently without power as the storm spreads across the region.
As Friday’s evening rush approached, trains in and out of Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan were operating on or close to schedule after earlier flooding at a New Jersey transit hub and issues with an Amtrak track in a Hudson River tunnel, according to New Jersey Transit. Flooding along the Hudson River in New Jersey caused delays during the morning commute, stranding riders and cars in Hoboken and Edgewater.
NJ TRANSIT train service in and out Hoboken Terminal is subject to up to 30-minute delays due to high water conditions. Stay up to date on the latest service info! 📝 Latest service info: https://t.co/dGkCxuemZl 📱App: https://t.co/03tPV6KtIv 🚉 Twitter: https://t.co/owJJ67JpkY pic.twitter.com/3LWpIK71iD
Massive flooding in the Edgewater Marketplace pic.twitter.com/JZENxXqHFl
Jamie McGee and Clifford Krauss
Tennesseans were experiencing more than just cold weather on Friday. They were also finding it a challenge to keep the lights on.
In the morning, the Tennessee Valley Authority, which generates power for all of Tennessee and parts of several neighboring states, asked customers to reduce their power use “as much as possible without reducing safety.” There were localized brownouts — sharp drops in voltage — and “brief, intermittent power outages,” the authority said.
Nashville, where temperatures were below 0 degrees shortly after sunrise, was enduring rolling 10-minute power outages every few hours for several hours on Friday. At 1 p.m., 55,000 Nashville customers lacked power.
Nashville Electric Service asked the city’s residents to delay using their washing machines, dryers and dishwashers, to keep their thermostats no higher than 68 degrees and to turn to warm sweaters, socks and blankets. It also advised that they pull back curtains to put the sun’s warmth to use.
Michael D. Regan and Sarah Maslin Nir
A punishing blizzard dumped snow across Western New York throughout the day Friday, showing no sign of abating as gusting winds left more than 100,000 people without power and forced officials to ban motorists from the roads. Late Friday afternoon, as conditions worsened and the storm spread, the governor expanded a travel ban in Erie County to include Genesee, Niagara and Orleans counties.
“The storm is definitely as advertised,” Byron W. Brown, the mayor of Buffalo, said in an interview. “Buffalo is used to dealing with normal snowfall,” he added. “There are some people in Buffalo saying this is one of the worst storms they’ve ever seen. We are dealing with it fine, but certainly it is a very challenging storm.”
As the snow piled up, he said, emergency responders were fielding numerous calls for downed trees, toppled power lines and shorted-out traffic lights. As of 3 p.m. more than 110,000 people in New York were without power, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul.
About 2,800 energy workers had been mustered to fix power outages as they occurred, according to Mayor Brown, but the conditions slowed their ability to make repairs. “In these whiteout conditions you can’t go up in a bucket truck,” he said.
A total of 7,700 workers from the state’s utilities are on hand to help dig out and manage the storm, according to the governor’s office. The state has also deployed 65 plow truck operators to the region.
By midafternoon most residents in Buffalo appeared to have hunkered down. The punishing wind spewed thick, wet snow, cutting visibility to just a few feet.
Snow clung to tree trunks and limbs and buried whole vehicles as roadways became increasingly impassable with each new layer of accumulation. Buffalo Bills football flags whipped furiously in front yards where Christmas lights and decorations were obscured or buried by the blizzard.
The storm turned a lone man braving the streets of downtown Buffalo into a Santa Claus look-alike, white snow caking his beard and jacket.
To prepare for frigid temperatures expected in the evening, the county set up about 20 warming shelters, but at about 2 p.m. on Friday, a few had lost power, according to Mark Poloncarz, the county executive. People seeking refuge there would be transferred elsewhere, he said on Twitter. “It is wickedly bad out now,” Mr. Poloncarz wrote.
Eric Anderson, 30, of Buffalo, a truck driver on leave for the holidays, was filling up his tank at a gas station near downtown Buffalo amid whiteout conditions as wet snow blanketed his S.U.V.
Mr. Anderson said he left home to purchase rubbing alcohol. The frigid temperatures had frozen the lock on the door to his house when he went outside for 10 minutes to check on his vehicle early Friday afternoon, he said.
“You don’t realize how bad it is outside until you get out here,” he said. “It’s supposed to get worse.”
Mr. Anderson said he was unable to finish Christmas shopping because of the storm and planned to skip a family holiday gathering to avoid the snow.
“I’m heading right home now, and I’m going to stay there until Christmas.”
By early afternoon, along Elmwood Avenue on the city’s west side, a normally bustling street lined with small businesses was consumed by increasingly poor weather.
Visibility was near zero, with few people out braving the wind that swirled snow around in every direction. Plow trucks meandered by with flashing lights, caked with several inches of accumulation. Most establishments remained closed.
On a street nearby, Lenny Verrastro, who has lived in Maui, Hawaii, for the past two decades, was shoveling the sidewalk in front of his Airbnb with his wife, Sarah, and 5-year-old son, Miles. Mr. Verrastro grew up in Buffalo, but his son had never seen snow before. He couldn’t get enough of it.
“He’s been eating so much snow,” Mr. Verrastro said. “And we built a snowman in the back.”
As the flakes swirled wildly around the family, Mr. Verrastro beamed. “We’re loving this,” he said. “We wished for a white Christmas.”
The Minnesota Department of Transportation closed parts of Interstate 90 again this afternoon as strong winds kicked up snow, creating dangerous driving conditions. The agency had reopened the highway to traffic at 10:30 a.m. Friday after closing it on Thursday because of the storm.
In Omaha, the Rev. Paul Chatmon, 86, ate lunch on Friday at the North Corps Community Center. He lives across the street in Salvation Army housing and said the winter storm had brought the coldest weather he could remember. The center, run by the Salvation Army, offers free lunch five days a week and serves as a warming center during extreme weather.
According to FlightAware, a flight-tracking website, more than 11,000 U.S. flights had been disrupted by late afternoon on Friday, about the same as the total number of disruptions on Thursday.
Many New Englanders have so far reacted to the storm with a characteristic mix of stoicism and acceptance, even as downed trees and tidal surges have knocked out power and closed roads.
At the Landing, an iconic, brown-shingled restaurant at the edge of Marblehead Harbor, north of Boston, Dina Sweeney, the manager, wore foul-weather gear as she stood outside watching water from the Atlantic Ocean smash through the metal grates and railings at the harbor’s edge, scattering seaweed across the parking lot.
Inside the restaurant, she said, flooding had caused significant damage, buckling the floor, despite the protective hatches built into the structure that allow the ocean water to pass in and out. “It’s a very angry ocean,” she said.
Still, Ms. Sweeney had not given up hope of serving customers on Friday on the side of the building farthest from the water. “We won’t open for lunch,” she said. “But maybe dinner.”
Not far away, the police had shut down the narrow causeway connecting Marblehead Neck to the rest of the town, as towering waves crashed over the road.
Stranded at home, some residents of the remote neighborhood, known for its sweeping views, seized the opportunity to skip the holiday bustle and sit back and watch the ocean roil.
Anne Shore, who has lived in Marblehead for more than 40 years, watched gulls fight the wind outside her windows on Friday, as the waves below sent frothy plumes of water 25 or 30 feet into the air. “It’s an amazing sight as well as a frightening sight,” she said. “It’s beautiful to watch.”
Some 80 miles north, in Kennebunk, Maine, the town’s harbor master, Jamie Houtz, said the storm had flooded and closed roads there on Friday morning. But the severity, he said, was typical for this time of year, with wind intensities and wave heights well below hurricane strength.
“I wouldn’t say too many things are floating away,” Mr. Houtz said. “Everyone knows what time of year it is, and no one left their boats in jeopardy.”
He said that he expected hundreds of private homes along Maine’s coast to be damaged, but that the toll would not come as a surprise to homeowners. “That’s the cost of living on the water,” he said.
New Jersey officials are warning drivers to stay off the roads as temperatures plummet, bringing the risk of a “flash freeze” on wet pavement. Earlier in the day, the the New Jersey Transportation Department barred commercial vehicles and motorcycles from many large roads, including Route 78 and Route 80.
Several crashes involving about 50 vehicles on the Ohio Turnpike killed at least three people on Friday, according to the Ohio State Highway Patrol. The crashes were in Erie County in northern Ohio. The authorities were sending buses to take stranded motorists to a shelter for warmth; temperatures were below 0, with winds whipping above 35 miles per hour.
🚨UPDATE: Troopers on scene confirm three fatalities. Crews continue to clear vehicles from the roadway. White-out conditions persist. Travel is not recommended.#OhioTurnpikeMP106Crash
Mark Churchman was driving home from a performance of “The Nutcracker” in Cincinnati at around 10 p.m. Thursday when he suddenly found himself stopped behind a line of trucks and cars on the highway. Nothing was moving.
Hours passed, temperatures plunged well below zero, and Mr. Churchman realized that he wasn’t going to make it home to Louisville, Ky., any time soon. He said motorists who tried to bypass the traffic jam by driving on the shoulder ended up stuck in snowy ditches.
He ended up spending 12 hours stuck in the traffic jam on Interstate 71, where the Kentucky State Police and National Guard passed out blankets to stranded drivers and took some to shelters.
I-71 Northbound is closed beginning at exit 62 in Gallatin Co. Southbound is slow moving. Please avoid this area. https://t.co/DIgR3XXJRw pic.twitter.com/MMm1xt16k6
“I learned how to sleep in my truck in a fetal position,” Mr. Churchman, 54, an electrician, said in an interview after he finally arrived home at about 1 p.m. Friday, exhausted but safe. “That was pretty uncomfortable,” he said. “But I did it.”
A portion of the northbound side of I-71 was still closed on Friday afternoon, and vehicles were still stuck there, according to Kentucky state transportation officials, who shared a photo on Twitter earlier in the morning of a line of semitrailer trucks on the snow-covered highway in Gallatin County.
Eight members of the Guard were deployed to help clear the backup, using a Humvee with a winch and a large military tow truck to move stranded vehicles to the shoulder, according to Lt. Col. Carla Raisler, a Guard spokeswoman.
Staff Sgt. Jerami Tewsley arrived around 4 a.m. on Friday, sent first to check on a family that had been stuck in a car for hours with no gas or heat. Condensation from everyone’s breath had frozen on the inside of the windows, he said. He helped bring them to a warm Humvee.
“They were extremely grateful that we showed up,” Sergeant Tewsley said in an interview on Friday, after spending 13 hours working in the brutal cold. “They had no blankets and only had jackets on, and they were freezing.”
Gov. Andy Beshear said the police gave blankets to drivers who had chosen to stay in their vehicles, and were bringing others to local shelters. “Please stay safe & let’s give thanks to these heroes for their work,” Mr. Beshear wrote on Twitter on Friday.
Mr. Churchman said he was fortunate to have had protein bars and water in the car, and enough gas in the tank to keep the engine running for heat. “You wonder about other people, if there’s someone back there that needs medicine or doesn’t have gas,” he said.
Dennis Schrodt, a cattle farmer in Bevington, Iowa, had to dig deep into a closet Friday morning to find the warmest gloves he owned.
“We haven’t had anything like this in quite a while,” he said by phone. He said that his usual gloves weren’t enough to withstand Thursday’s sub-zero temperatures when he went on his evening check of the watering system for 34 cattle he overwinters for spring calving.
Mr. Schrodt used a tractor earlier this week to place hay bales in the pastures where the cattle, a mix of hardy Angus and Hereford breeds, survive by bunching together out of the wind behind hills and in brushy areas, even on the state’s coldest nights.
“I think they’re more miserable in summertime, when it’s really hot,” he said. “That’s when they can’t get any relief.”
Mr. Schrodt is counting the days until an expected warm-up on Sunday, when a high of 19 degrees is forecast. Until then, he said, he’ll keep those gloves at the top of the pile, along with shirts, sweatshirts, coats, insulated boots and coveralls.
“Yesterday, I counted up the layers,” he said, “and I had eight. It was doable, but you don’t want to stay out very long in this weather.”
About 30 miles to the southwest, Angus cattle hurried up a pasture trail on Steve and Tara Agan’s farm Friday morning. Covered with winter coats, the animals had been hunkered down in a valley but heard Mr. Agan, who goes by the nickname Bubba, start a tractor, which meant he was about to fill their feeding bunks with silage and alfalfa.
Temperatures had reached minus 9 degrees overnight, and even as the cattle munched under a winter sun on Friday, wind gusts whipped snow up around them, pushing the wind chill to as low as minus 27 degrees.
“Your eyelashes freeze in minutes out here,” said Ms. Agan, adding that the biggest challenge was keeping her fingers warm, even in thick gloves, when bottle-feeding some of the calves. “But you don’t have a choice. You have to come out. The cows need fed in the winter just as much as they do in the summer.”
A Spirit Airlines flight that departed Philadelphia International Airport for Cancun this morning returned after crew members reported multiple lightning strikes, the Federal Aviation Administration said. A spokesman for Spirit said that the flight turned back out of an abundance of caution. Travelers got off, and the airline is working to re-book them. The F.A.A. said that it will investigate the incident.
Despite the cringey nickname “Hotlanta,” which locals do not use, Atlanta can handle occasional freezing temperatures. What the city can’t handle is freezing temperatures plus precipitation.
That was the problem in January 2014, when less than three inches of snow sent the largest metropolitan area in the Southeast into what felt like a societal meltdown, with thousands of vehicles left stuck and stranded on the highways for hours, including dozens of school buses full of children.
Mockery rained down from the North, including a memorable Saturday Night Live skit in which a fictional Atlantan named Buford Calloway recounted the horrors of the day while seemingly in need of a fainting couch.
Friday was different. Temperatures were in the teens, but the pale blue sky over Atlanta was nearly cloudless, and the traffic roared across the Interstates like it does on any other day.
Still, there were challenges. Warming shelters opened up at fire stations, senior centers and public school campuses. Gov. Brian Kemp declared a state of emergency on Wednesday, prohibiting price gouging of heating fuels and warning of the formation of black ice on the roads. But in Atlanta proper, weather forecasters do not expect any serious chance of precipitation until next Friday, long after the cold snap lifts.
At Ponce City Market, a trendy indoor-outdoor mall set along the Atlanta BeltLine, the city’s vaunted recreation trail, most of the action was inside on the second-to-last shopping day before Christmas. A few workers emptying trash cans braved the weather in bulky coats and black half-masks.
At an outpost of Marine Layer, the casual clothing chain, Jennifer Velasco, 35, was waiting on customers in a poofy winter coat and a white wool hat. Every time the door opened, the wind and the cold would come in. Ms. Velasco had moved to Atlanta from Houston a few months ago. She was not pleased.
“I hate the cold,” Ms. Velasco said. “It’s the worst. It hurts. Everything is dry.”
Outside, somewhere close to the J. Crew and the Allbirds shop, Ryan Lynch, 41, a director-producer, was walking Eloise, his basset hound mix, and was considerably more sanguine. Mr. Lynch, a New York resident, grew up in Minneapolis — a fact made evident by his “Skol Vikings” sweatshirt.
Mr. Lynch said he was used to cold, though not so much in Atlanta, where he was visiting family for the holidays. He had thrown a dressy tweed overcoat over the purple sweatshirt. In fact, he had thrown on all kinds of things. “I’ve got every layer in my luggage,” he said. “I didn’t realize it was going to be this cold.”
A few minutes later, he emailed a reporter a nugget of Minnesota wisdom: “There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad attitudes.”
Rory Guthrie, 11, and Ted Guthrie, 13, had “Suicide Hill” — one of Kansas City’s most popular sledding sites — all to themselves on Friday afternoon. Despite the temperature of 4 degrees and gusty winds, Rory and Ted expected to take at least 10 more runs. “I can last pretty long,” Rory said.
The snow — light and sparse — finally arrived in New York City around 2 p.m., though it mostly swirled in the air and melted quickly away. Temperatures were expected to drop steadily throughout the afternoon, to a low of 9 degrees overnight.
Temperatures around 0 degrees made for sparse holiday-season foot traffic in Nashville’s normally bustling downtown district on Friday, but tourists and local musicians still dotted the sidewalks, bundled up in hoods and gloves against the cold.
Kyle Elliott, 29, crossed the Cumberland River on a pedestrian bridge with his black felt hat in his hand and his guitar slung over his back, on his way to perform at Luke’s 32 Bridge, a music club a couple of blocks from the Ryman Auditorium. After 15 minutes of walking, he said, he’d lost feeling in his feet.
“I’ve never experienced weather this cold before,” said Mr. Elliott, a native Middle Tennessean. “I’ve never felt my facial hair freeze before. I have now.”
Given the conditions, the audience would probably be small for his three-hour gig, he said, but he was hopeful that visitors staying in hotels downtown would come out, for lack of anything better to do in the bitter cold, to hear him perform “Christmas in Dixie” and other songs.
“I’m playing for the security guards and bartenders,” he said. “We get a base pay, but much more money comes from tips, so it’s going to be a long day.”
Goran Nedeljkovic, a mail carrier in Chicago, said he was surprised that the U.S. Postal Service made employees complete their routes by foot on Friday (despite its famous — but unofficial — creed, "Neither snow, nor rain..."). “I have five or six layers on, so my body is OK, but my fingertips keep freezing through my gloves, my glasses keep fogging up, and my scanner isn’t working because of the cold,” said Nedeljkovic, 59, adding, "It really hurts your face.”
The storm has forced at least six U.S. refineries, including the largest, to curb their output of gasoline, diesel and other fuels, according to Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis at Oil Price Information Service. "The good news is, the idle time should be limited," he said. Oil and gasoline prices usually rise in January, and the refinery downtime will likely contribute to moderately higher prices in the coming days, although the the harsh weather should decrease holiday travel, limiting demand.
With the storm bearing down on New England, coastal flood warnings were posted from Rhode Island to southern Maine in advance of surging high tides, while downed trees forced road closures across the region. The National Weather Service reported wind gusts approaching 60 miles per hour on Cape Cod and on Cape Ann, north of Boston.
At La Guardia Airport in Queens on Friday, there were short lines and little of the holiday chaos typical for the day before Christmas Eve, generally one of the most high-volume travel days of the year. More than 100 flights had been canceled there, part of the 4,000 flights canceled nationwide, according to Flight Aware, which tracks cancellations and delays.
Ruby Freeman, 31, a customer service agent with Southwest Airlines, said the quiet scene belied the chaos of the day before, when lines snaked through Terminal B as travelers rushed to beat the weather. Friday was calm, she said, because so many flights have been canceled. “We are completely out of flights,” she said. “The canceled flights won’t even be scheduled until after Christmas.”
Sharisse Wooding, 41, was experiencing just that. A school principal from Memphis, Ms. Wooding and her extended family had spent the week enjoying Manhattan as tourists. On Friday, the fun was over: They sat in La Guardia Airport that morning after their Southwest Airlines flight was canceled, trying to figure out how to get home for Christmas. Southwest had automatically rebooked them for Monday, the day after the holiday.
“This is not how I’m supposed to spend my Christmas break,” Ms. Wooding said. She described the situation as “a little bit heartbreaking.”
Andrew Brown, 34, a hotel general manager from Edgewater, N.J., and his family were disappointed when they arrived at the airport with skis and six pieces of luggage, only to find that their United Airlines flight to Denver was canceled. “We woke up all packed and hopped into the car,” Mr. Brown said.
The family was eventually able to score a new flight from a different airport, Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, later in the day that would take them to Houston and then Denver — thanks, they said, to a charm offensive by their 4-year-old daughter, Drew Gomes-Brown.
“I think it was Drew singing ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘Happy New Year’” to the ticketing agent, Mr. Brown said. “If we couldn’t have gotten out of here today, we would’ve been devastated.”
Michael Smith, 64, a bank attorney from TriBeCa, was en route to Chicago when his United Airlines flight was delayed. He was prepared for the vicissitudes of winter travel: He waited out the delay by snacking on the doughnut he had brought to avoid paying for overpriced food at the airport.
Mr. Smith thought the Midwest would take deep freeze in stride. “We get negative 52 and we just fly anyway,” he said of Chicago. “I’m prepared for it. When you’re going to the cold places at Christmas time, it’s just the norm.”
Degrees warmer or colder than average low temperature for Dec. 24
Note: Forecast as of Dec. 23 at 5 p.m. Eastern time.
Sources: PRISM Climate Group at Oregon State University (daily average minimum temperatures for 1991-2020); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (daily forecast minimum temperatures)
The arctic air mass is making its way into northeastern coastal cities during the early afternoon on Friday, and will eventually extend deep into the Florida Peninsula.
“Temperature will rapidly drop, as much as 15 to 20 degrees, in just a few hours,” forecasters at the New York office of the National Weather Service said on Friday morning. “Wind chills will be in the single digits, to around 10 above zero by late afternoon.”
With the arctic air mass fully entrenched across the eastern United States, at least 44 states will experience frigid, below-average low temperatures early on Saturday morning.
Freezing temperatures will remain for many areas through the holiday weekend, with locations west of the Mississippi River beginning to warm up by Sunday.
“Temperatures will moderate this weekend for portions of the Northern Rockies and High Plains, resulting in nearly 40- to 60-degree warm-up,” forecasters with the Weather Prediction Center said.
As a sprawling winter storm hits the United States and Canada, some people are moving up their Christmas dinner preparations, racing against potential power outages.
By late Friday morning, nearly 1.5 million customers in the United States and Canada were without electricity, according to poweroutage.us, which compiles data from utilities. And with the storm continuing, more outages could be coming.
Renée Dyer, a novelist in Epping, N.H., said she had planned to make a roast for Christmas Day, and her sons had decided on a hot chocolate cake for dessert. But after losing power on Friday morning, and with high winds expected to continue for at least another day, she knew she needed to change her tack.
Instead of the cake, she decided on a no-bake eggnog cheesecake. “Even if we don’t have our oven back, we can still make a festive dessert,” she said. For Christmas Eve, her family will keep it simple: Takeout pizza. “Something we’ve never done,” she added. “We’re really changing everything up last-minute.”
She is still searching Pinterest for a replacement main dish for Christmas Day. “It might end up being a spaghetti night,” Ms. Dyer said. “Whenever things don’t go the way you plan, just make a new plan, and try to make it as fun as possible.”
Nearly 1,000 miles away, in northern Michigan, David and Kathy Coveyou, who run an organic vegetable farm, said they were cooking in advance in case they lost power. Mrs. Coveyou said she had already made a potato casserole dish — a family favorite — Christmas cookies and a Swedish apple pie, which they would warm up on a grill. “Normally, we’d still be baking today,” Mr. Coveyou said. If power goes out, they will roast a pork loin on the grill, instead of in the oven.
“No matter what comes, we’re going to be enjoying it, and there’s so much beauty up here with the snow,” Mr. Coveyou said. “We might lose power but we’re going to have an absolutely wonderful Christmas.”
It can seem counterintuitive that on a warming planet, winter storms can produce so much snow. But it’s actually a fairly logical consequence of climate change’s intensifying effect on the earth’s water cycle.
More extreme precipitation events — snow as well as rain — are “exactly what we expect in a warming world,” said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
As the planet warms, so do both the oceans and the atmosphere. Warmer oceans increase the amount of water that evaporates into the air, and warmer air can hold more water vapor, which it eventually releases as precipitation.
Overall, winter temperatures are warming, and the length of the winter season is shortening. Warmer temperatures mean that more of that precipitation will fall as rain rather than snow, according to Sean Birkel, climatologist for the state of Maine. But some places could still see more snowfall than before, when rising temperatures are still below the freezing point.
Wira Engine Mounting Global climate change unfolds a story of extremes: Historically wet areas are likely to experience increased precipitation, while historically dry areas may see more drought, as higher evaporation rates dry out the soil.