- Judd Sherin and Max Matza
- BBC, Washington and Seattle
About 200 million Americans feel the icy grip of the massive winter storm that swept across the United States just before the Christmas holidays and has so far claimed at least 12 lives.
More than 1.5 million people lost power and thousands of flights were canceled on Friday.
The massive storm stretches more than 3,200 kilometers from Texas to Quebec.
The bomb cyclone caused a blizzard in the Great Lakes region on the US-Canada border.
Experts use the term “hurricane bomb” and sometimes “weather bomb” to describe a rapid drop in air pressure.
In Canada, the provinces of Ontario and Quebec are bearing the brunt of the Arctic storm, with hundreds of thousands of people without electricity.
Much of the country, from British Columbia to Newfoundland, was also under severe warnings of winter cold and storms.
The US National Weather Service (NWS) said its map for Friday “shows one of the biggest winter weather warnings ever.”
Temperatures in Elk Park, Montana have dropped to minus 45 degrees, while Hill City, Michigan is freezing.
And in South Dakota, indigenous people burned their snow-covered clothes after they ran out of fuel, officials said.
Authorities were forecasting heavy snow in the Pennsylvania and Michigan regions. At least 35 inches of snow was expected in Buffalo and New York. The weather service said more than eight million people were still receiving blizzard warnings.
Coastal flooding has also been observed in New England, New York and New Jersey.
image copyright Reuters
Cows were also affected after a blizzard in Sturgis, South Dakota
And in the Pacific Northwest states, Seattle and Portland, some residents have taken up ice skating on the frozen streets.
The more temperate southern states of Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Georgia also faced deep freeze warnings.
The storm-related death toll included traffic accidents, including a 50-car rear-end collision in Ohio that killed two drivers.
Problems with getting around the country have been exacerbated by a shortage of snowplow operators, which some have attributed to low wages.
More than 5,600 US flights were also canceled on Friday, according to tracking site FlightAware, as many people try to return to their cities for the Christmas break.
By Friday evening, according to PowerOutage.us, the number of customers complaining about power outages in the US had reached nearly one million.
Utilities throughout the Tennessee Valley were forced to shut down to provide power.
The Met Office says more than 100 extremely cold temperatures could be set in the coming days. Compared to decades old records :
- In Denver, Colorado, the temperature dropped to -24 Fahrenheit on Thursday, the lowest since the 1990s. Craig McBrearty, 34, a Scotsman who lives in Denver, told the BBC it was “colder than I ever knew”.
- Wichita, Kansas experienced the coldest winds on record since 2000, with a low of -32 degrees Fahrenheit.
- The city of Nashville, Tennessee has seen temperatures drop below freezing for the first time in 26 years.
- The city of Casper, Wyoming, reached a new all-time low Tuesday of -42 degrees Fahrenheit.
