About 350,000 homes and businesses lost power across the US on Thursday as freezing rain and snow weighed down tree limbs and encrusted power lines, part of a winter storm that caused a deadly tornado in Alabama, dumped more than a foot of snow in parts of the Midwest, and brought rare measurable snowfall and hundreds of power outages to parts of Texas. Storm conditions also caused headaches for travelers across the country as airlines canceled more than 9,000 flights scheduled for Thursday or Friday in the US, per the AP. The disruptive storm began Tuesday and moved across the central US on Wednesday's Groundhog Day, the same day the famed groundhog Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter.
The highest totals of power outages blamed on icy or downed power lines were concentrated in Tennessee, Arkansas, Texas, and Ohio, but the path of the storm stretched further, from the central US into the South and Northeast. Heavy snow was expected from the southern Rockies to northern New England, while forecasters said heavy ice buildup was likely from Pennsylvania to New England through Friday. Parts of Ohio, New York, and northern New England were expected to see heavy snowfall, with 12 to 18 inches of snow possible in some places through Friday, Andrew Orrison, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in College Park, Md., said. However, ice accumulations were expected to be the primary hazard from central and eastern Pennsylvania through the Catskills of New York to New England.
Along the warmer side of the storm, strong thunderstorms capable of damaging wind gusts and tornadoes were possible Thursday in parts of Mississippi and Alabama, the Storm Prediction Center said. In western Alabama, Hale County Emergency Management Director Russell Weeden told WBRC-TV a tornado that hit a rural area Thursday afternoon killed one person and critically injured three others. A home was heavily damaged, he said. Tornadoes in the winter are unusual but possible, and scientists have said the atmospheric conditions needed to cause a tornado have intensified as the planet warms.
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In Texas, the return of subfreezing weather brought heightened anxiety nearly a year after February 2021's catastrophic freeze that buckled the state's power grid for days, leading to hundreds of deaths in one of the worst blackouts in US history. Facing a new test of Texas' grid, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said it was holding up and on track to have more than enough power to get through the storm. Texas had about 70,000 outages by Thursday morning, nowhere close to the 4 million outages reported in 2021.
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