By Rich McKay and Maria Tsvetkova
Jan 27 – At least 38 people across 14 states had died as of Tuesday from a powerful winter storm that left much of the central and eastern U.S. gripped by snow, ice, and below-freezing temperatures, according to local officials and news reports.
The storm started to develop on Friday and dumped snow across a large region over the weekend. The snow snarled road traffic and led to widespread flight cancellations and power outages before subsiding Monday, leaving behind bitter cold that is expected to linger.
By Tuesday, cities were mobilizing emergency responders and resources to ensure that residents, particularly homeless people, were safe, even as more than 550,000 homes and businesses across the country lacked electricity.
Ten of the storm’s fatal victims were in New York City, where temperatures were the coldest they had been in eight years, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said at a news conference on Tuesday, when the low hit 8 degrees Fahrenheit.
While the 10 victims were found outside, it was not clear whether they were homeless. Mamdani told reporters Monday that some of the dead “had had interactions with our shelter system in the past. It is still too early to share a broader diagnosis or a cause of death.”
New York City postponed from this week until early February an annual count of its homeless population required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
“Outreach workers should be focused on bringing New Yorkers inside, not on data collection,” Mamdani said. “Here is the bottom line, New York City: Extreme weather is not a personal failure.”
Around 500 of the more than 4,000 homeless people estimated to live in the city’s streets and subway have been placed in shelters since January 19, Mamdani said. Outreach workers were checking every two hours on 350 homeless people who are at particular risk due to underlying medical conditions.
In Nashville, Tennessee, a city of about 680,000 where more than 135,000 homes and businesses remain without power, the temperature is expected to drop to 6 degrees Fahrenheit by Wednesday morning with below-zero wind chills.
“Let’s be clear about what this is,” Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell said at a Tuesday press conference. “It is an historic ice storm.”
Nashville officials said about 1,400 homeless people had filled all three of the city’s homeless shelters and two overflow shelters, with police and firefighters working overtime and emergency workers checking the streets.
The Nashville Rescue Mission, a homeless charity that feeds, clothes and offers shelter year-round, typically might have about 400 people a night, but in the cold snap that number has swollen to about 7,000.
“We’re always full, but we never turn anyone away,” an attendant who was not authorized to speak to reporters so did not give a name told Reuters by telephone. “When the weather is bad, people come in out of the cold.”
VARIOUS CAUSES OF DEATH
Across the country, storm-related causes of death ranged from hypothermia and exposure to cardiac incidents while clearing snow.
In Bonham, Texas, about 55 miles northeast of Dallas, three young boys died after falling in an ice pond over the weekend, though the exact circumstances were unclear, according to the local fire department.
Several hours away in Austin, Texas, a person died of apparent hypothermia while trying to shelter at an abandoned gas station, authorities said. Other hypothermia deaths were reported from Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and Michigan, local media reported.
Almost 200 million Americans remain under some form of winter cold warning at least through February 1.
Forecasters are watching for another possible winter storm to impact the eastern U.S. this weekend, said David Roth, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta and Maria Tsvetkova in New York; Writing by Julia Harte; editing by Donna Bryson and Alistair Bell)
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