A powerful winter storm is affecting millions of people in the eastern parts of the United States on Monday, leaving its mark from Florida to Maine with brutal tornadoes, freezing rain, and large amounts of snow.
The most amount of snowfall could be seen in various areas of Ohio, some of which have reported more than two feet, such as in Ashtabula on Lake Erie. Just north of Buffalo, in Grand Island, New York, 22 inches of snow was reported by the National Weather Service Eastern Region.
Powerful Winter Storm
Somewhere south in Banner Elk, North Carolina, residents were not spared; they had to weather 20 inches of snow. The powerful storm also brought heavy snowfall on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday in the Northeast and caused widespread power outages, major road closures, and flight cancellations a day earlier across the Southeast.
Wintry conditions caused a severe backlog on air travel as more than 1,600 U.S. flights were canceled as of Monday evening. The cancellations came after almost 3,000 other flights were already canceled on Sunday based on FlightAware.com's data, CNN reported.
The storm caused power outages to more than 170,000 people in the eastern United States on Monday morning. The majority of the outages occurred in New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia, based on data from PowerOutage.us.
In an interview, meteorologist Marc Chenard said that the North Carolina mountains experienced the largest amount of snow. Heavy snow accumulation was also reported across western Massachusetts, eastern Pennsylvania, and some areas of New England. New York City and Boston also had reports of significant snow brought by the storm.
Despite the damages of the storm, it was not yet finished as the National Weather Service Buffalo wrote in a Twitter post on Monday that they anticipated between 12 to 18 inches of snow will fall in Western New York during the day. They also noted that there would be between eight and 14 inches of snow in Genesee Valley, Finger Lakes, and east of Lake Ontario, The Hill reported.
Vehicular Crash
The powerful winter storm also took the lives of two people in North Carolina when harsh conditions caused a vehicular crash. Two individuals, a man, and a woman, who were both 41 years old, died on Sunday morning after being involved in a crash along I-95 near Rocky Mount.
The incident was caused by a "mixture of wintry precipitation" that was falling in the area that made it dangerous for vehicles to drive through. Highway patrol released a statement where they said that initial investigation revealed that the crash involved a blue Honda CRV that traveled off the road to the left and subsequently crashed into several trees in the median.
The risky conditions have forced Ohio authorities to warn drivers to stay off roads as vehicles are "stuck everywhere." The Ohio Department of Transportation said conditions were somehow improving in the western and central portions of the state. They posted on Twitter that nearly 1,000 crews were still on the road trying to clear lanes for drivers to pass through, Fox News reported.
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