Dec 26,2022:A brutal winter storm has killed at least 32 people across the United States and is expected to claim more lives after trapping some motorists inside their cars and knocking out power to several hundred thousand homes and businesses.
Much of the loss of life has centred in and around the city of Buffalo at the edge of Lake Erie in western New York state, as numbing cold and heavy “lake-effect” snow — the result of frigid air moving over warmer lake waters — persisted through the Christmas weekend.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the storm’s confirmed death toll climbed to 12 on Sunday, up from three reported overnight in the Buffalo region. The latest victims included some found in cars and some in snow banks, Poloncarz said, adding that the death tally might rise further.
Despite a ban imposed on driving since Friday, hundreds of Erie County motorists were stranded in their vehicles over the weekend, with National Guard troops called in to help with rescues complicated by white-out conditions and drifting snow, Poloncarz said.
“This is not the Christmas any of us hoped for nor expected,” he said on Twitter. “My deepest condolences to the families who have lost loved ones.”
The scope of the storm has been nearly unprecedented, stretching from the Great Lakes near Canada to the Rio Grande river along the border with Mexico. About 60 percent of the US population faced some sort of winter weather advisory or warning, and temperatures plummeted drastically below normal from east of the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, the National Weather Service said.
The storm, one of the fiercest in decades, forced the cancellation of more than 2,400 US flights on Sunday, in addition to some 3,500 scrapped Saturday and nearly 6,000 Friday, according to tracking website Flightaware.com.
Travellers remained stranded or delayed at airports throughout Christmas Day, including in the cities of Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Detroit and New York. The airport in Buffalo remained closed, with the National Weather Service saying that the snow total there stood at 109cm (43 inches) on Sunday morning.
