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

More than 4,000 flights were cancelled in the United States yesterday ahead of the monster winter storms, which had already cut power to more than 230,000 customers in states as far west as Texas before bringing heavy snow to the states in the east.

Snow, sleet, freezing rain, and extremely cold temperatures are forecast to sweep the eastern two-thirds of the nation on Sunday and into the coming week.

Describing the storms as 'historic,' President Donald Trump on Saturday signed federal emergency declarations for 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 said in a post made on Truth Social platform.

Seventeen states and DC have already issued weather-related emergency declarations, according to DHS.

“We do have tens of thousands of people in affected states in the South that have lost power,” Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told ABC on Saturday.

“We have utility crews that are working to restore that as quick as possible.” The number of outages continued to grow."

The number of outages continued to rise. At present, till 2:44am EST today, Sunday, the United States had about 230,000 customers without electricity, mostly in Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, Tennessee, and New Mexico, poweroutage.com reported.

An emergency order, issued on Saturday by the Department of Energy, has authorized the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to utilize backup generation resources for data centers and other large facilities, with an aim to restrict blackouts.

In addition to this, on Sunday, the Department of Emergency issued an emergency order giving authorization to operate "specified resources" in PJM Interconnection, a grid operator that spans the mid-Atlantic region, despite any limitations for operating it under state laws or environmental regulations.

“This system is exhibiting an anomalously large size for a winter storm system and a very long duration.” The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning for this particular event, “with a vastly broadened area of widespread, possibly intense, icy precipitation.” For this particular event, “crippling to locally catastrophic impacts.