Thousands of flights were canceled and homeless shelters were packed Thursday in one of the most treacherous US holiday travel seasons in decades, with temperatures plummeting 27 degrees Celsius in some areas in a matter of hours.
Forecasters warned of a so-called “bomb cyclone” looming that could further aggravate conditions ahead of Christmas for much of the country.
Frigid air was moving east across the central United States, and wind chill warnings had been issued that would affect an estimated 135 million people in the coming days, weather service meteorologist Ashton Robinson Cook said Thursday.
In places like Des Moines, Iowa, the temperature will feel minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, making it possible to suffer frostbite in less than five minutes.
“This is not like a snow day from when you were a kid,” President Joe Biden warned Thursday at the White House after a briefing by federal officials. “This is something serious.”
Forecasters expect a bomb cyclone, which occurs when air pressure drops very quickly during an intense storm, to develop near the Great Lakes this Friday. That will unleash blizzard conditions, including high winds and snow, Cook said.
In South Dakota, Robert Oliver, emergency manager for the Rosebud Reservation Sioux Tribe, said tribal officials have been working to clear roads to supply propane gas and firewood to homes, but are facing unrelenting winds that it has created snowdrifts up to 3 meters high in some places.
“This weather and the amount of equipment we have… we don’t have enough,” Oliver said, noting that rescues of people trapped in their homes had to be halted early Thursday morning when hydraulic fluid from machinery heavy froze in the middle of a wind chill of 40 degrees below zero.
He added that five people have died in recent storms, including a blizzard last week.
In Texas, temperatures were expected to drop rapidly, but state officials vowed no recurrence from the February 2021 storm, which overwhelmed the state’s power grid and has claimed hundreds of deaths.
The cold weather has spread to El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, where hundreds of migrants have been camping out in the open or in shelters as they await a decision on U.S. asylum restrictions.
More than 2,156 flights to, from or within the United States had been canceled as of Thursday afternoon, according to the FlightAware tracking site.
Airlines have also canceled 1,576 flights this Friday. The Chicago and Denver airports had the highest number of cancellations.
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