Life-threatening cold clutches majority of the nation
By
Adriana Navarro, AccuWeather staff writer
Updated Feb 17, 2021 3:00 PM EST
Subfreezing temperatures combined with failing electric power spurred the opening of heating centers from Oregon to Texas to West Virginia as the most unrelenting winter weather pattern in decades swept across the nation and left nearly three-quarters of the contiguous United States with some amount of snow cover.
Across the nation, 4.1 million customers were without power by Tuesday morning, 4 million of those customers in Texas alone. Another 223,000 customers were in the dark in Oregon and 202,000 across Oklahoma as temperatures dipped to levels of record-breaking cold.
By the afternoon, outages began declining, but still more than 3.7 million customers throughout Texas remained without power. The ongoing outages will cause an economic fallout bad enough to rival that of a significant hurricane season, AccuWeather Founder and CEO Dr. Joel N. Myers said.
The dropping temperatures and power outages prompted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to announce Monday that the state would be deploying the National Guard to help conduct welfare checks and transport residents in need to one of the 135 warming centers.
As of late Monday night, the city of Dallas' Office of Homeless Solution (OHS) and its partners were serving 629 people at shelters due to the inclement weather, including 475 who had sought shelter at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center, a city spokesperson told AccuWeather via email.
People seeking shelter from below-freezing temperatures rest inside a church warming center Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, in Houston. More than 4 million people in Texas still had no power a full day after historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures created a surge of demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to such extreme lows, buckling the state's power grid and causing widespread blackouts. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
The Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center is not an overnight shelter, however, and while the city has had guests staying in hotel rooms to compensate for this, power outages did not spare even hotels. The guests were then relocated to the convention center.
Tuesday's average high in Dallas is up to around 61 degrees Fahrenheit, but temperatures are forecast to dip and run a solid 20 degrees or more below average before Saturday when the cold snap is expected to break.
"The coldest of the cold is now, but the chill likely persists through the rest of this before any appreciably warming trend kicks off this weekend," AccuWeather Meteorologist Matt Benz said. "The daytime highs are downright frigid, but low temperatures at night are even more dangerous with temperatures well below freezing through Friday night."
City of Richardson worker Kaleb Love works to clear ice from a water fountain Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, in Richardson, Texas. Temperatures dropped into the single digits as snow shut down air travel and grocery stores. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
At least 10 fatalities related to the winter weather have been reported in the Houston area, according to The Houston Chronicle, including an older woman and three of her grandchildren found in a house fire in Sugar Land, a city half an hour away from Houston. Firefighters found the mother outside of the home with burn injuries, and she is expected to survive.
Sugar Land Fire Department spokesman Doug Adolph said that they had been trying to keep warm with a fireplace, citing posts on the family’s social media accounts, as the neighborhood was without power.
The total number of fatalities also includes two men who were found dead along the Houston-area roadways, according to The Associated Press. While the causes of death were still under investigation, officials said the temperatures were likely to blame.
"We're living through a really historic event going on right now," Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, told the AP, referencing the winter storm warnings across Texas and the extent of the freezing temperatures.
Record low temperatures were recorded Tuesday morning from Texas to Iowa to Louisiana. In Shreveport, Louisiana, the temperature not only dropped below the old record of 20 degrees, set in 1903, but surpassed it by 19 degrees, with the mercury registering 1 degree above zero.
The Louisiana Department of Health confirmed the death of a 50-year-old man in Lafayette Parish who died after slipping on ice and hitting his head on the ground on Monday. The health department noted the fatality as the first death related to the storm. The department continued in a statement to warn residents using generators to keep them outside their homes to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning in the case of a power outage.
Texas grapefruit trees encased in ice after a winter storm hammered the state with record cold. (Dale Murden)
(Dale Murden)
The cold snap's influence stretched as far south as the southern tip of Texas, threatening the yield of the citrus groves. About 50% of the season's grapefruit had been harvested to date, Dale Murden, president of Texas Citrus Mutual, a trade group that represents the interests of citrus producers in the state told AccuWeather. To give an idea of the impact, Texas is the nation's third-largest citrus-producing state behind California and Florida.
Florida is the only state that hasn't had any form of snow over the past 24 hours as of late Tuesday morning, according to the National Weather Service office in Duluth, Minnesota. In fact, as of Tuesday, 73.2% of the contiguous U.S. was covered by snow.
Since snow cover began being tracked regularly in 2003, this is the highest percentage of the contiguous 48 states to be covered by snow. The old record was 70.9% on Jan. 12, 2011.
Nearly all regions of the nation had some snow cover on the ground outside of the southeastern U.S. And that number has exploded in recent days, up from just 29.1% of the nation being snow-covered in January. Last year by the middle of February, 35.5% of the contiguous U.S. was covered by snow. The nation hasn't been this snow-covered in mid-February at any point in at least the last 10 years.
It's not just the cold that the nation will have to deal with throughout the week, but more snow and ice as well.
"Travel once again sounds downright dangerous tonight through tomorrow across much of the region as roads turn icy and snow-covered," Benz warned.
Several car accidents have already been reported across Texas since last week, notably the pileup involving around 133 cars that left at least six people dead. Monday, icy conditions contributed to other crashes, and the Louisiana State Police reported it had investigated nearly 75 weather-related crashes in the past 24 hours, according to the AP.
Some states have been preparing for the winter weather since the weekend, including when Abbott issued a disaster declaration across the state on Friday. President Joe Biden issued a Federal Emergency Declaration for Texas on Sunday, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management (FEMA) to provide emergency protective measures and direct federal assistance. In addition, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and Arkansas' Asa Hutchinson each activated National Guard units to assist in response efforts.
In addition to the loss of life and suffering caused by the storm, the economic damages will be enormous. AccuWeather estimates the total damage and economic loss caused by the recent coast-to-coast winter storms to be between $45 and $50 billion.
“We have been experiencing one of the stormiest patterns seen in decades,” said AccuWeather Founder and CEO Dr. Joel N. Myers, who has been studying the economic impact of severe weather for over 50 years. “The damage has been exacerbated by the record cold temperatures that have pushed all the way to the Gulf Coast this week."
To put the economic toll of the storm into context, AccuWeather’s estimate for the entire 2020 hurricane season, one of the most active hurricane seasons in recent years, was $60-65 billion.
Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier, Spectrum, Fubo, and Verizon Fios.
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News / Winter Weather
Life-threatening cold clutches majority of the nation
By Adriana Navarro, AccuWeather staff writer
Updated Feb 17, 2021 3:00 PM EST
Subfreezing temperatures combined with failing electric power spurred the opening of heating centers from Oregon to Texas to West Virginia as the most unrelenting winter weather pattern in decades swept across the nation and left nearly three-quarters of the contiguous United States with some amount of snow cover.
Across the nation, 4.1 million customers were without power by Tuesday morning, 4 million of those customers in Texas alone. Another 223,000 customers were in the dark in Oregon and 202,000 across Oklahoma as temperatures dipped to levels of record-breaking cold.
By the afternoon, outages began declining, but still more than 3.7 million customers throughout Texas remained without power. The ongoing outages will cause an economic fallout bad enough to rival that of a significant hurricane season, AccuWeather Founder and CEO Dr. Joel N. Myers said.
The dropping temperatures and power outages prompted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to announce Monday that the state would be deploying the National Guard to help conduct welfare checks and transport residents in need to one of the 135 warming centers.
As of late Monday night, the city of Dallas' Office of Homeless Solution (OHS) and its partners were serving 629 people at shelters due to the inclement weather, including 475 who had sought shelter at the Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center, a city spokesperson told AccuWeather via email.
People seeking shelter from below-freezing temperatures rest inside a church warming center Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, in Houston. More than 4 million people in Texas still had no power a full day after historic snowfall and single-digit temperatures created a surge of demand for electricity to warm up homes unaccustomed to such extreme lows, buckling the state's power grid and causing widespread blackouts. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
The Kay Bailey Hutchinson Convention Center is not an overnight shelter, however, and while the city has had guests staying in hotel rooms to compensate for this, power outages did not spare even hotels. The guests were then relocated to the convention center.
Tuesday's average high in Dallas is up to around 61 degrees Fahrenheit, but temperatures are forecast to dip and run a solid 20 degrees or more below average before Saturday when the cold snap is expected to break.
"The coldest of the cold is now, but the chill likely persists through the rest of this before any appreciably warming trend kicks off this weekend," AccuWeather Meteorologist Matt Benz said. "The daytime highs are downright frigid, but low temperatures at night are even more dangerous with temperatures well below freezing through Friday night."
City of Richardson worker Kaleb Love works to clear ice from a water fountain Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, in Richardson, Texas. Temperatures dropped into the single digits as snow shut down air travel and grocery stores. (AP Photo/LM Otero)
At least 10 fatalities related to the winter weather have been reported in the Houston area, according to The Houston Chronicle, including an older woman and three of her grandchildren found in a house fire in Sugar Land, a city half an hour away from Houston. Firefighters found the mother outside of the home with burn injuries, and she is expected to survive.
Sugar Land Fire Department spokesman Doug Adolph said that they had been trying to keep warm with a fireplace, citing posts on the family’s social media accounts, as the neighborhood was without power.
The total number of fatalities also includes two men who were found dead along the Houston-area roadways, according to The Associated Press. While the causes of death were still under investigation, officials said the temperatures were likely to blame.
"We're living through a really historic event going on right now," Jason Furtado, a professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, told the AP, referencing the winter storm warnings across Texas and the extent of the freezing temperatures.
Record low temperatures were recorded Tuesday morning from Texas to Iowa to Louisiana. In Shreveport, Louisiana, the temperature not only dropped below the old record of 20 degrees, set in 1903, but surpassed it by 19 degrees, with the mercury registering 1 degree above zero.
The Louisiana Department of Health confirmed the death of a 50-year-old man in Lafayette Parish who died after slipping on ice and hitting his head on the ground on Monday. The health department noted the fatality as the first death related to the storm. The department continued in a statement to warn residents using generators to keep them outside their homes to prevent carbon monoxide poisoning in the case of a power outage.
Texas grapefruit trees encased in ice after a winter storm hammered the state with record cold. (Dale Murden)
The cold snap's influence stretched as far south as the southern tip of Texas, threatening the yield of the citrus groves. About 50% of the season's grapefruit had been harvested to date, Dale Murden, president of Texas Citrus Mutual, a trade group that represents the interests of citrus producers in the state told AccuWeather. To give an idea of the impact, Texas is the nation's third-largest citrus-producing state behind California and Florida.
Florida is the only state that hasn't had any form of snow over the past 24 hours as of late Tuesday morning, according to the National Weather Service office in Duluth, Minnesota. In fact, as of Tuesday, 73.2% of the contiguous U.S. was covered by snow.
Since snow cover began being tracked regularly in 2003, this is the highest percentage of the contiguous 48 states to be covered by snow. The old record was 70.9% on Jan. 12, 2011.
Nearly all regions of the nation had some snow cover on the ground outside of the southeastern U.S. And that number has exploded in recent days, up from just 29.1% of the nation being snow-covered in January. Last year by the middle of February, 35.5% of the contiguous U.S. was covered by snow. The nation hasn't been this snow-covered in mid-February at any point in at least the last 10 years.
It's not just the cold that the nation will have to deal with throughout the week, but more snow and ice as well.
"Travel once again sounds downright dangerous tonight through tomorrow across much of the region as roads turn icy and snow-covered," Benz warned.
Several car accidents have already been reported across Texas since last week, notably the pileup involving around 133 cars that left at least six people dead. Monday, icy conditions contributed to other crashes, and the Louisiana State Police reported it had investigated nearly 75 weather-related crashes in the past 24 hours, according to the AP.
Some states have been preparing for the winter weather since the weekend, including when Abbott issued a disaster declaration across the state on Friday. President Joe Biden issued a Federal Emergency Declaration for Texas on Sunday, authorizing the Federal Emergency Management (FEMA) to provide emergency protective measures and direct federal assistance. In addition, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and Arkansas' Asa Hutchinson each activated National Guard units to assist in response efforts.
In addition to the loss of life and suffering caused by the storm, the economic damages will be enormous. AccuWeather estimates the total damage and economic loss caused by the recent coast-to-coast winter storms to be between $45 and $50 billion.
“We have been experiencing one of the stormiest patterns seen in decades,” said AccuWeather Founder and CEO Dr. Joel N. Myers, who has been studying the economic impact of severe weather for over 50 years. “The damage has been exacerbated by the record cold temperatures that have pushed all the way to the Gulf Coast this week."
To put the economic toll of the storm into context, AccuWeather’s estimate for the entire 2020 hurricane season, one of the most active hurricane seasons in recent years, was $60-65 billion.
Related:
Keep checking back on AccuWeather.com and stay tuned to the AccuWeather Network on DirecTV, Frontier, Spectrum, Fubo, and Verizon Fios.
Report a Typo