150m people under winter advisories as 'unprecedented' storm stretches across 25 states; Texas sees power outages

An "unprecedented" winter storm continued its assault on the American nation Monday, leaving millions without power in Texas and wreaking travel havoc across a wide swath of the central and southern USA because of heavy snow and ice.

 More than 150 million people were under a winter storm warning, winter weather advisory or ice storm warning in 25 states, stretching over 2,000 miles from southern Texas to northern Maine, the National Weather Service said.

Bitter, record-smashing cold accompanied the storm across the central USA. Hundreds of daily record low temperatures have been or will be broken during this prolonged "polar plunge," the weather service said, "with some February and even all-time low temperature records in jeopardy."

More than 50 million people could see temperatures dip below zero during the next several days, according to the Capital Weather Gang.

Outages were widespread Monday, and over 4.4 million were powerless, according to poweroutage.us, a utility tracking site. In Texas alone, more than 3.4 million customers were in the dark as of 2 p.m. local time.

Rotating power outages were initiated by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT, Monday, meaning thousands went without electricity for short periods as temperatures fell into the teens near Dallas and Houston.

"We urge Texans to put safety first," the council tweeted as it urged residents to reduce electricity use. ERCOT manages the flow of electric power in the state.

Utility companies in both Kansas and Missouri also implemented rolling blackouts Monday in response to overwhelming demand for power during the intense cold.

The nation’s largest oil refinery shut down because of the brutal weather. Motiva said it shut down the Port Arthur, Texas, refinery because of “unprecedented” freezing conditions along the Gulf Coast.

Matt Varble in the Dallas suburb of Las Colinas told The Dallas Morning News his power had gone out a couple of times Monday morning. The second time, it went out around 3:30 a.m. and hadn’t returned as of 7 a.m.

“It’s starting to get very cold inside my house,” Varble told the newspaper. “I lived in the north for a very long time and nothing like this has ever happened when I lived in New York, Ohio and Illinois.”

Houston, where temperatures hit the 70s last Tuesday, saw readings in the teens Monday morning, prompting officials to advise residents to prepare for hazardous roads that could be similar to those experienced after a Category 5 hurricane.

In Texas, the storm could be a "once in a generation" event when factoring in the brutally cold conditions, AccuWeather meteorologist Brandon Buckingham said.

San Angelo, Texas, had its snowiest day recorded Sunday – 10.1 inches, the weather service said.

Thundersnow was reported early Monday as far south as the Gulf Coast in Galveston, Texas, and Lake Charles, Louisiana, weather.com reported.

Source: USA Today

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