By RUSS BYNUM and KRISTIN M. HALL Associated Press
When a massive winter storm descended on the Northeast and parts of the South over the weekend, Lisa Patterson planned to stick it out at her family’s home in Nashville.
But after she and her husband lost power, trees fell onto their driveway and their wood stove proved no match for the frigid temperatures, the couple and their dog had to be rescued and taken to a warming shelter.
“I’ve been snowed in up there for almost three weeks without being able to get up and down my driveway because of the snow. I’m prepared for that. But this was unprecedented,” Patterson said.
The family was among many across Tennessee and other parts of the South that have fled to warming shelters as crews worked to restore power to hundreds of thousands of households in the face of a new influx of arctic air expected to spur freezing temperatures Tuesday in places already covered in snow and ice.
At least 30 deaths have been reported in states afflicted with severe cold, including two people run over by snowplows in Massachusetts and Ohio, fatal sledding accidents that killed teenagers in Arkansas and Texas, and a woman whose body was found covered in snow in Kansas. In New York City, officials said eight people were found dead outdoors over the frigid weekend.
The storm had dropped over a foot (30 centimeters) of snow across a 1,300-mile (2,100-kilometer) swath from Arkansas to New England, halting traffic, canceling thousands of flights and triggering wide school closures Monday. The National Weather Service said areas north of Pittsburgh got up to 20 inches (50 centimeters) of snow and faced wind chills as low as minus 25 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 31 degrees Celsius) late Monday into Tuesday.
More widespread record cold temperatures were forecast for Tuesday, with eastern Texas through western Pennsylvania under extreme cold warnings, according to the National Weather Service. In Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear warned that the temperatures could be so frigid that as little as 10 minutes outside “could result in frostbite or hypothermia.”
And forecasters said it’s possible another winter storm could hit parts of the East Coast this weekend.
There were still nearly 550,000 power outages in the nation Tuesday morning, according to poweroutage.com. Most of them were in the South, where weekend blasts of freezing rain caused tree limbs and power lines to snap, inflicting crippling outages on northern Mississippi and parts of Tennessee. Officials warned that it could take days for power to be restored.
In Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves said Monday at least 14 homes and 20 public roads had major damage in the aftermath of the state’s worst ice storm since 1994. The University of Mississippi canceled classes for the entire week as its Oxford campus remained coated in treacherous ice.
New York City saw its snowiest day in years, with neighborhoods recording 8 to 15 inches (20 to 38 centimeters) of snow, forcing the nation’s largest public school system to shut down.
Meanwhile, bitter cold followed in the storm’s wake. Communities across the Midwest, South and Northeast awakened Monday to subzero weather. The entire Lower 48 states were forecast to have their coldest average low temperature of minus 9.8 F (minus 12.3 C) since January 2014.
Nathan Hoffner sent his 4-year-old son to stay with his son’s mother after his rental house in Nashville lost power midday Sunday. He and his roommate layered up with clothes and several blankets overnight and by the next morning the temperature inside the home had dropped dramatically.
“I saw my breath in the house,” Hoffner said.
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Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia, and Hall from Nashville, Tennessee. Associated Press writers around the country contributed.