Washington/New York, Dec 26 (EFE).- While the icy storm that has frozen the country in the middle of Christmas subsides, the United States tries this Monday to recover from the havoc caused by the Arctic front that has taken the lives of more than 50 people, half in the Buffalo, New York area.
Storm Elliot, described as “once in a generation” by the National Weather Service (NWS), has caused freezing temperatures from the Great Lakes, near Canada, to the Rio Grande (also called the Rio Grande), in the border with Mexico.
Heavy snowfall and hurricane-force winds have left thousands of people trapped in their homes and on the roads, thousands of passengers stranded on Christmas Eve due to flight cancellations, and thousands of homes without power due to the collapse of electrical infrastructure.
US President Joe Biden said his “heart goes out to those who lost loved ones this holiday weekend.”
BUFFALO, AT THE CENTER OF THE DAMAGES
According to the count of the local press, more than 50 people have died in recent days from the ravages of the storm, about half in the northeast of the state of New York, where Buffalo is located.
The death toll in that state amounts to 27, 18 of them in Buffalo, although authorities expect to find more dead in the coming hours. The bodies were found in vehicles, in houses and on the street.
It had been decades since this city, bordering Canada and used to cold, had not experienced such a harsh winter. It has been completely collapsed by snow and its airport, which provides coverage to the famous Niagara Falls, remains closed.
Hundreds of members of the National Guard, the Police and the fire department were deployed in the area.
The situation is such that the New York governor, the Democrat Kathy Hochul, has asked the federal Administration to declare the northwest of the state a catastrophic area.
Hochul emphasized in a press conference from Buffalo the importance of this measure to deal with the costs and expenses caused by the storm. President Biden promised him in a call “the resources they need to overcome” this crisis.
In addition to New York, deaths from the cold or accidents have been recorded in the states of Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin, according to local media.
In Ohio, four people died and several were injured in a spectacular accident on a freeway in which about 50 vehicles were involved.
SAD AND COLD CHRISTMAS
More than 200 million Americans, about 60% of the population, have faced some form of winter weather advisory or advisory, with temperatures dropping dramatically below normal from the Rocky Mountains east to the Appalachians. .
“Much of the eastern United States will remain frozen on Monday and a moderation trend will begin on Tuesday,” the weather service reported on Monday, a holiday in the country.
The agency warned that in some areas it is still “dangerous” to travel by road due to snow, but predicted that conditions would improve within a couple of days.
Elliot caused thousands of flight delays and the cancellation of 20% of flights on Christmas Eve and Christmas Eve, when thousands of people tried to reunite with their families.
As of Monday, more than 5,300 flights were canceled, according to the Flight Aware portal.
It also left 1.7 million homes and businesses without power due to the impact of the blizzards on the electrical system and the high demand for heating.
As late as Monday afternoon, some 90,000 users were still in the dark, mainly in the states of Washington, New York and Maine, according to Power Outage tracking.
Precisely in the state of Washington, in the extreme northwest of the country, where another cold front is approaching, the authorities are investigating the sabotage by unknown subjects of four electrical substations that left thousands of people without power on Christmas Day.
These holidays were the coldest in 40 years in the eastern half of the country, including Florida, known as “the sunshine state.”
New York City experienced a minimum temperature of 10.5 °C below zero on Christmas Day, something not seen since 1872. Washington, the US capital, was at 10 °C below zero, the coldest Christmas since 1983, and Thermometers in Tampa, Florida, dropped below zero degrees, something that had not happened since 1966.
(c) EFE Agency