A dangerous winter storm swept the northern US on Friday, with blinding snow in some places, freezing rain in others, and bitter cold temperatures and whipping winds across several states.
The massive storm continues a week of strong winter weather for much of the US that has led to deadly avalanches and treacherous ice-covered roads. On Friday, a man was believed dead in an avalanche in the Idaho backcountry. A Wisconsin man died while snow-blowing his driveway.
Authorities announced Friday that a suburban Chicago man had died of cold exposure, apparently becoming the first cold-related death of the season. The man, whose identity wasn’t released, was found Thursday in the suburb of Schiller Park, the Cook county medical examiner’s office said.
An autopsy performed Friday found that the man’s death was weather-related, and the medical examiner’s office ruled it an accident.
Flight cancellations were widespread, with US airlines cancelling more than 2,000 flights according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware. More than 7,000 flights experienced delays.
In Idaho, two men were rescued after being caught in an avalanche Thursday afternoon near the Montana border, but a third man was missing and presumed dead. The US Air Force assisted in the search and rescue. The area had been under an avalanche danger warning for several days.
The Idaho avalanche came a day after the first US avalanche death of the season was reported in California on Wednesday. The avalanche at a Lake Tahoe ski resort swept up four people and killed one.
In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee county medical examiner’s office said Friday afternoon that it was investigating the death of a 69-year-old man who became unresponsive while snow-blowing his driveway in Franklin, a Milwaukee suburb. No further information was released.
Blizzard warnings were issued in some places, including south-western Minnesota and the Green Bay area of Wisconsin. Forecasts for the Milwaukee area predicted heavy snow stretching into Saturday morning with wind gusts up to 40mph (64 km/h).
Michigan residents grappled with losing power as a result of the storm. According to the PowerOutage tracking website, more than 130,000 customers were without electricity.
The cold was the bigger concern in the Dakotas. It was -11F (-24C) in Bismarck, North Dakota, on Friday morning, and forecasters warned the weekend would get even worse, saying it could reach -20F (-29C) by early Sunday.
Chicago is expecting several inches of snow through the weekend, with wind chills well below zero. Advocates worried for the growing population of people sent up from the US-Mexico border – more than 26,000 have arrived since last year. By Friday, dozens were staying in eight parked “warming buses” to avoid sleeping outside while they await space in city-run shelters.
Angelo Travieso, a Venezuelan bused up from Texas, wore a light jacket and sandals with socks after sleeping on one of the buses.
“I slept sitting because there is almost no space left,” he said. “The buses are also small and you practically have to stay inside because of the heating, because it is deadly cold outside.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson said the city will suspend plans to enforce a 60-day cap on shelter stays for asylum seekers through at least 22 January because of the cold snap.
Temperatures were below 0F across Montana on Friday morning with wind chills as low as -57F (-49C) in places along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains and in the central part of the state.
At the Double Cross Cattle Company, a ranch near Roberts, Montana, Tyson Ropp used an axe to chop through inches of ice covering a stock tank so that his bulls could drink water. He used a feed truck to spread extra hay for his cows, a process he planned to repeat later Friday.
Temperatures were expected to drop overnight to -28F (-33C), so Ropp said he’d spread straw on the ground, somewhere out of the wind, for the cattle to rest and stay dry.
“It’s going to get pretty chilly tonight,” he said, “We’ve got a couple hidey holes they can get into and bed down and hunker down together and stay warm.”
Ropp shrugged off the cold.
“It’s just Montana,” he said.
Other areas of the north-east had flooding concerns. Emergency responders helped evacuate some residents from their homes in Paterson, New Jersey, early Friday as the Passaic River started overflowing its banks. The new storm, combined with one earlier in the week, created flooding worries in Maine and New Hampshire, too.
The south wasn’t immune. Severe storms with winds reaching 70mph (113 km/h) stretched across Mississippi.
Arctic air is expected to arrive in the south by this weekend. The Mississippi emergency management agency urged residents to prepare for ice, frigid temperatures and possible prolonged power outages. Louisiana governor Jeff Landry declared a state of emergency Friday in anticipation of temperatures plunging over the weekend, with a chance of sleet and snow early next week.
Texas governor Greg Abbott on Friday encouraged residents of that state to get ready, too. Temperatures will reach only into the 30s Sunday through Tuesday, with ice in the forecast for Monday. But Abbott said the cold and ice “will not be anything close to what we experienced during winter storm Uri”. That storm in February 2021 caused more than 3 million Texans to lose power.
Volunteers and city leaders in several places were worried about the unhoused.
Portland, Oregon, is more accustomed to winter rain, but snow was in the forecast. Tyrone McDougald wore a long-eared, leopard-style hat on Thursday as he sorted through racks of warm clothes at a homeless service center. He was already wearing multiple layers, but with no roof of his own, he grabbed two more coats to help him face a bitter cold snap arriving in the north-west.
“I’m hoping that I can get in a shelter,” he said. “That would relieve a lot of the burden.”
