A severe winter storm across the United States has triggered widespread power outages and significant disruptions to air travel.
According to the Poweroutage portal, roughly 500,000 households are without electricity, with the southern states worst hit. In Tennessee, where more than 1.3 centimetres of ice have accumulated, over 128,000 customers are offline. Texas and Mississippi each report more than 100,000 affected households.
The storm has also caused massive flight cancellations. Since Saturday, more than 15,000 flights in the U.S. have been called off. On Sunday alone, almost 10,000 flights-both domestic and international-were cancelled, representing nearly a quarter of the flights the Federal Aviation Administration processes in a single day. By Monday, the expected last day of the storm, over 1,800 flights had already been cancelled, mostly out of New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C.
The National Weather Service warned that lingering snow and freezing rain could produce hazardous road and sidewalk ice through the following week. Many cities opened heat shelters for the homeless, and long queues formed outside supermarkets as people stocked up on food. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called the event a “historic winter storm” while Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy noted that up to 240 million Americans could be affected.