WASHINGTON, Jan 25 (Reuters): More than 670,000 customers in the US as far west as Texas were without power and more than 9,600 flights were expected to be canceled on Sunday ahead of a monster winter storm that threatened to paralyze eastern states with heavy snowfall.
Forecasters said snow, sleet, freezing rain and dangerously frigid temperatures would sweep the eastern two-thirds of the nation on Sunday and into the week.
Calling the storms "historic," President Donald Trump on Saturday approved federal emergency disaster declarations in South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, Maryland, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Indiana, and West Virginia.
"We will continue to monitor, and stay in touch with all States in the path of this storm. Stay Safe, and Stay Warm," Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
Seventeen states and the District of Columbia have declared weather emergencies, the Department of Homeland Security said. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, at a news conference on Saturday, warned Americans to take precautions.
"It's going to be very, very cold," Noem said. "So we'd encourage everybody to stock up on fuel, stock up on food, and we will get through this together." "We have utility crews that are working to restore that as quick as possible," Noem added.
The number of outages continued to rise. As of 6:30 a.m. EST (1130 GMT) on Sunday, more than 400,000 US customers were without electricity, according to PowerOutage. us, with 100,000 each in Mississippi and Texas. Other states affected included Louisiana, Tennessee and New Mexico.
The Department of Energy on Saturday issued an emergency order authorizing the Electric Reliability Council of Texas to deploy backup generation resources at data centers and other major facilities, aiming to limit blackouts in the state.
On Sunday, the DOE issued an emergency order to authorize grid operator PJM Interconnection to run "specified resources" in the mid-Atlantic region, regardless of limits due to state laws or environmental permits.
The National Weather Service warned of an unusually expansive and long-duration winter storm that would bring widespread, heavy ice accumulation in the Southeast, where "crippling to locally catastrophic impacts" can be expected.
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