Hundreds of thousands of households and businesses were without power Friday morning as a deadly winter storm left parts of the United States facing potentially hazardous buildups of ice.
As of early Friday morning, more than 300,000 customers were out of power from Texas to Pennsylvania, with snow and freezing rain weighing down tree limbs and affecting power lines, according to outage tracker PowerOutage.us.
Outages were reported Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, with more than 138,000 customers left without power in Tennessee alone as of around 4 a.m. ET.
Feb. 4, 202200:39
The storm also prompted another day of flight cancellations, with more than 2,650 flights within, into and out of the U.S. canceled, adding to the more than 5,200 flights called off on Thursday, according to flight tracking platform FlightAware.
Parts of the country, including Ohio, New York and northern New England, are expected to see heavy snowfall as the storm pushes further east, according to the National Weather Service.
Meanwhile, freezing rain in the Northeast raised concerns about potentially hazardous ice accumulations from central Pennsylvania eastward into the Catskills in New York.
According to the weather service, “significant ice accumulation is possible,” with snow, rain and freezing rain potentially making for “difficult conditions along with some power outages and tree damages.”
Even with the storm moving off to sea late Friday and Saturday, Rick Otto, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland, said ice and snow are expected to linger in its wake. due to subfreezing temperatures.
The accumulation of ice could pose a hazard, Otto telling The Associated Press: “Snow is a lot easier to plow than ice.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
