U.S. storm leaves 230,000 without power, forces thousands of flight cancellations

More than 4,000 flights were canceled successful the U.S. connected Saturday up of a monster wintertime tempest that had already chopped powerfulness to much than ‍230,000 customers arsenic acold westbound arsenic Texas and ‍threatened to paralyze eastbound states with dense ‍snowfall.

Forecasters said snow, sleet, freezing rainfall and dangerously frigid temperatures would expanse the eastbound two-thirds of the federation connected Sunday and into the week.

Calling the storms "historic," President Donald Trump connected Saturday approved national exigency catastrophe declarations successful South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, and ‌West ‌Virginia.

"We volition proceed to monitor, and enactment successful interaction with each States successful ​the way of this storm. Stay Safe, and Stay Warm," Trump wrote successful a station connected Truth Social.

Seventeen states and the District of Columbia person declared upwind emergencies, the Department of Homeland Security said.

"We bash person tens of thousands of radical successful affected states successful the South that person mislaid ⁠power," DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said connected Saturday. "We person inferior crews that are moving to reconstruct that arsenic speedy arsenic possible."

The fig of outages continued to rise. As of 2:44 a.m. EST (0744 GMT) connected Sunday, immoderate 230,000 U.S. customers had nary electricity, the bulk of them successful Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee and New Mexico, according to PowerOutage.com.

The Department of Energy connected Saturday issued an exigency bid authorizing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to deploy backup procreation resources astatine information centers and different large facilities, aiming to bounds blackouts successful the state.

On Sunday, the DOE issued an exigency bid to authorize grid relation PJM Interconnection to tally "specified resources" successful the mid-Atlantic region, careless of limits owed to authorities laws oregon biology permits.

The National Weather Service warned of an unusually expansive, long-duration wintertime tempest that would bring widespread, dense crystal accumulation crossed the Southeast, wherever "crippling to locally catastrophic impacts" are expected.

Weather work forecasters predicted grounds acold temperatures and dangerously acold upwind chills descending further into the Great Plains portion by Monday.

As of 10:21 p.m. EST, much than 4,000 U.S. flights scheduled for Saturday had been canceled, according to formation tracking website FlightAware. More than 9,400 U.S. ‍flights primitively acceptable for Sunday besides person been canceled.

Major U.S. airlines warned passengers to enactment ‌alert for abrupt formation changes and cancellations.

On Saturday, Delta Air Lines continued to set its docket and made further ⁠cancellations successful the greeting for Atlanta and on the East Coast, including successful Boston and New York City.

The bearer added it was relocating experts from cold-weather hubs to enactment de-icing and baggage teams astatine respective confederate airports.

JetBlue said ‍that arsenic of Saturday greeting it had canceled astir 1,000 flights done Monday.

United Airlines said its upwind preparations included proactively canceling immoderate flights successful places with the worst weather.

U.S. electrical grid operators connected Saturday stepped up precautions to debar rotating blackouts.

Dominion Energy, whose Virginia operations see the world's largest postulation of information centers, said that if its crystal forecast holds, the wintertime lawsuit could beryllium among the largest to impact the company.

Noem, astatine a quality league astir U.S. authorities preparations for the storm, warned Americans to instrumentality precautions.

"It's going to beryllium ⁠very, precise cold," Noem said. "So we'd promote everybody to ‌stock up connected fuel, banal up connected food, and we volition get done this together."