Prolonged winter storms on the East Coast left thousands of homes without working power and fifty deaths by Christmas morning.
QUICK FACTS:
- Severe winter storms that brought heavy snow and high winds to a majority of the United States this past week have caused 50 deaths and left thousands of homes without power.
- Potentially the most deadly impact near Buffalo, New York brought 43 inches of snowfall and impassable, frozen road conditions, officials in Erie County said.
- “I don’t want to say that this is going to be it because that would be a fallacy for me to say that, because we know that there are people who have been stuck in cars for more than two days,” Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said Sunday. “There are people in homes who are below freezing temperatures.”
- Throughout the past week, the storm brought dangerously cold temperatures across the country, leaving more than 55 million people under wind chill alerts through Sunday morning.
- Major cities in the Midwest, Southeast, and East Coast reported record-low Christmas temperatures not seen in decades.
- States across the country are expected to warm up to above-normal temperatures by the end of the week.
ERIE COUNTY EXECUTIVE MARK POLONCARZ ON THE DEADLY WINTER STORM THROUGHOUT THE COUNTRY:
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime, generational blizzard,” Poloncarz said. “This is a horrible situation.”
BACKGROUND:
- Officials in Buffalo compared the storm to the city’s worst blizzard in January 1977, which brought record-low temperatures and deadly conditions to the area for weeks.
- Powerful winds blew loose snow from Lake Erie onto land, burying homes and cars in large snow drifts.
- Twenty-nine people died in four days, including 12 who were later found frozen in their cars.
- “The blizzard of 1977 lasted longer — it lasted three days of terrible conditions, this was two days of terrible conditions — but the ferocity of the storm was worse than the blizzard of 1977,” Poloncarz said Monday.
