Winter storm leaves 350,000 US homes without power

Heavy snowfall dumped across US as traffic is disrupted at major airports

Robert Garcia burns a small container of wood to attract customers as he sells firewood in Spring, Texas. AP

Sam Miller shovels a clear path for people to walk in central St Louis, Missouri, on February 3, 2022. AP

Snow and ice are cleared from the tarmac at Dallas Fort Worth International Airport in Grapevine, Texas. AP

A pedestrian races to catch his bus amid driving snow in central Cleveland, Ohio. AP

A shopper looks through the few remaining loaves of bread in a Reasor's in Tulsa, Oklahoma. AP

Traffic along eastbound Interstate 70 grinds to a halt in Columbia, Missouri, following several accidents after a winter storm dumped several centimetres of snow. AP

A worker clears snow from the front of a business in Chicago, Illinois. AFP

A worker clears snow from the front of a business in Chicago, Illinois. AFP

A woman cross-country skis in Denver, Colorado, as a winter storm sweeps the US. AP

A major winter storm that had already cut power to about 350,000 homes and businesses from Texas to Ohio glazed Pennsylvania and New England with ice and smothered them in snow on Friday.

The storm disrupted flights at cities in the US on Friday morning, including airports in New York City, Boston and Dallas.

Even after the storm pushes off to sea late on Friday and Saturday, ice and snow were expected to linger through the weekend because of subfreezing temperatures, said Rick Otto, meteorologist for the National Weather Service.

Parts of New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont had reports of 30 centimetres or more of snowfall on Friday morning, the National Weather Service said.

Flight-tracking service FlightAware showed more than 9,000 flights in the US scheduled for Thursday or Friday had been cancelled, on top of more than 2,000 cancellations on Wednesday as the storm began.

About 350,000 homes and businesses lost power from Texas to Ohio on Thursday as freezing rain and snow weighed down tree limbs and encrusted power lines as part of the storm that caused a deadly tornado in Alabama, dumped more than 30 centimetres of snow in parts of the Midwest and brought rare snowfall to Texas.

The icy weather is blamed for widespread power cuts in the Memphis, Tennessee, area, where more than 125,000 homes and businesses were without power on Friday morning, data from the website poweroutage.us, which tracks utility reports, showed.

About 85,000 homes and businesses in Ohio were also without electricity.

Many schools and businesses remained closed on Friday in areas hit by the wintry weather a day earlier because roads remained icy and temperatures never rose above freezing.

For a second straight night, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport officials mobilised to accommodate travellers stranded at the American Airlines hub overnight due to flight cancellations.

The Ohio Valley was especially affected on Thursday, with 211 flight cancellations at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport on Thursday.

Hundreds of flights were cancelled or delayed on Friday at LaGuardia Airport in New York, Boston’s Logan Airport and Newark Liberty Airport.

Freezing temperatures meant the ice would remain a problem for days, making driving dangerous, officials said. Robert Knecht, Memphis’s public works director, said on Thursday evening that there were 225 downed trees on city streets and crews were working 16-hour shifts to clear them.

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 mass power cuts in US history.

Facing a new test of Texas’s grid, Republican Governor Greg Abbott said it was holding up and on track to have more than enough power to bring the state's residents through the storm.

Texas had about 15,000 reported cuts on Friday morning, and earlier totals came nowhere close to the four million outages reported in 2021.