Millions of people have hunkered down to ride out the winter storm that has killed at least 34 people across the United States and is expected to claim more lives after trapping people inside houses and knocking out power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses.
The scope of the storm has been on a rarely seen scale, stretching from Canada down to the Rio Grande along the border with Mexico.
About 60% of the US population faced some sort of winter weather advisory or warning, and temperatures plummeted drastically below normal from east of the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, the National Weather Service said.
“In some areas, being outdoors could lead to frostbite in minutes,” the National Weather Service (NWS) said in a bulletin. The service advised anyone traveling or going outside to “prepare for extreme cold by dressing in layers, covering as much exposed areas of skin as possible and pack winter safety kits in your vehicles”.
The storm has led to fatalities in several states including Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, New York. As of Sunday, 60% of the US population was under a weather warning.
Across the border in Canada, authorities said a bus rolled over on an icy highway in British Columbia on Christmas Eve, killing four people and injuring three dozen. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said on Sunday that the bus crashed on Highway 97C east of Merritt.
The regional health authority said 36 people were treated for injuries ranging from minor to serious. Eight remained hospitalized on Sunday morning, including two in serious condition and two with non-life-threatening injuries.
The winter storm also hit Ontario and Quebec in recent days, causing flight cancellations and school closures, and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of customers
In the US, among the worst hit localities was Buffalo, where two days of heavy snow and high winds created conditions that local officials said were likely the most severe since 1977. Snow falls were predicted to be 4ft to 5ft as of Sunday evening, drifting to 6ft.
Three days into the blizzard, people remained stuck in cars on highways and streets, officials said. At one point every fire truck in the city was stranded, said the New York state governor, Kathy Hochul, while ambulances were averaging three hours per trip.
“It’s like a category 3 hurricane with a bunch of snow mixed in,” said Tim Carney, chief of the local sheriff’s office whose jurisdiction includes Buffalo.
The county’s executive, Mark Poloncarz, confirmed seven fatalities by early Sunday. “This is not the Christmas any of us hoped for nor expected, but try to have as merry a Christmas as possible today,” he tweeted.
Poloncarz added: “Remember the holiday spirit and why we’re a community of good neighbors. Again, my deepest condolences to the families who have lost loved ones.”
The storm knocked out power in communities from Maine to Seattle. But heat and lights were steadily being restored across the US. According to poweroutage.us, fewer than 200,000 customers were without power Sunday at 3pm EDT – down from a peak of 1.7 million.
The storm, which forecasters named Elliott, prompted the cancelation or delay of thousands of flights. There were 1,707 domestic and international flights canceled on Sunday as of about 2pm EDT, according to the tracking site FlightAware.
In New York, about 34,000 households were still without power Sunday, including 26,000 in Erie county, where utility crews and hundreds of national guard troops battled high winds and struggled with getting stuck in the snow.
Storm-related deaths were reported in recent days all over the country: 12 in Erie county, New York, ranging in age from 26 to 93 years old, and another in Niagara county where a 27-year-old man was overcome by carbon monoxide after snow blocked his furnace; 10 in Ohio, including an electrocuted utility worker and those killed in multiple car crashes; six motorists killed in crashes in Missouri, Kansas and Kentucky; a Vermont woman struck by a falling branch; an apparently homeless man found amid Colorado’s subzero temperatures; and a woman who fell through Wisconsin river ice.
The worst effects of Elliott are forecast to lift in some parts of the country. The weather service said conditions were “expected to slowly improve as the system weakens”. However, winds would “continue to filter in cold Canadian air to the eastern two-thirds of the nation”.
The storm is likely to return attention to the issue of climate change, which has likely aggravated conditions that produced the Elliot “bomb cyclone”. The Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) said on its website that “more snowfall during snowstorms is an expected effect of climate change”.
That’s because a warmer planet is evaporating more water into the atmosphere. That added moisture means more precipitation in the form of heavy snowfall or downpours, it said. In warmer months, the EDF said, that can cause record floods, “but during the winter – when our part of the world is tipped away from the sun – temperatures drop, and instead of downpours we can get massive winter storms”.
A more unstable jet stream attributed to a rapidly warming Arctic allows frigid polar air to penetrate further south than normal, the EDF said.
Associated Press contributed to this report