Northeast US sees more snow from tail end of colossal winter storm, at least 25 deaths reported
New York (AP): More snow piled up across the US Northeast on Monday under the tail end of a colossal winter storm that brought lingering misery to parts of the South, where freezing rain left hundreds of thousands shivering without electricity. At least 25 deaths were reported amid the severe weather.
Deep snow — over a foot extending in a 2,100-kilometre swath from Arkansas to New England — halted traffic, cancelled flights and triggered wide school closures Monday.
The National Weather Service said areas north of Pittsburgh got up to 20 inches of snow and faced wind chills as low as minus 31 degrees Celsius late Monday into Tuesday.
A rising death toll included two people run over by snowplows in Massachusetts and Ohio, fatal sledding accidents in Arkansas and Texas, and a woman whose body was found covered in snow by police with bloodhounds after she was last seen leaving a Kansas bar. In New York City, officials said eight people were found dead outdoors in the course of the frigid weekend.
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There were more than 750,000 power outages in the nation by Monday midafternoon, according to poweroutage.com. Most of them were in the South, where weekend blasts of freezing rain caused tree limbs and power lines to snap, inflicting crippling outages on northern Mississippi and parts of Tennessee.
Parts of Mississippi were reeling in the aftermath of the state's worst ice storm since 1994. Officials scrambled Monday to get cots, blankets, bottled water and generators to warming stations in hard-hit areas.
The University of Mississippi, where most students hunkered down without power Monday, cancelled classes for the entire week as its Oxford campus remained coated in treacherous ice. Oxford Mayor Robyn Tannehill said on social media that so many trees, limbs and power lines had fallen that “it looks like a tornado went down every street.”
A pair of burly, falling tree branches damaged real estate agent Tim Phillips' new garage, broke a window and cut off power to his home in Oxford. He said half of his neighbours had homes or vehicles damaged.
“It's just one of those things that you try to prepare for,” Phillips said, “but this one was just unreal.”
The US had more than 8,000 flight delays and cancellations nationwide Monday, according to flight tracker flightaware.com. On Sunday, 45 per cent of US flights got cancelled, making it the highest day for cancellations since the COVID-19 pandemic, according to aviation analytics firm Cirium.
More light to moderate snow was forecast in New England through Monday evening.
New York City saw its snowiest day in years, with 11 inches falling on Central Park. Main roads throughout the city were largely clear Monday morning, but pedestrians had to plod through snow on some sidewalks and multiple subway lines with above-ground tracks saw delays.
Bitter cold grips much of the nation
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Meanwhile, bitter cold followed in the storm's wake. Many communities across the Midwest, South, and Northeast awakened Monday to subzero weather. The entire Lower 48 states were forecast to have their coldest average low temperature of minus 12.3 C — since January 2014.
Record warmth in Florida was the only thing keeping that average from going even colder, said former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief scientist Ryan Maue, who calculates national averages based on National Weather Service data.
In the Nashville, Tennessee, area, electricity was back for thousands of homes and businesses Monday while more than 170,000 others awoke bundled up in powerless homes after subfreezing temperatures overnight. Many hotels were sold out overnight to residents escaping dark and frigid homes.
Alex Murray booked a Nashville hotel room for his family to ensure they had a working freezer to preserve pumped breast milk to feed their 6-month-old daughter. Anticipating a long wait until power gets restored at his home, Murray planned to extend their hotel stay through Wednesday.
“I know there's many people that may not be able to find a place or pay for a place or anything like that, or even travel,” Murray said Monday. “So, we were really fortunate.”
Storm leads to deaths in a number of states
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In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani's office said at least eight people were found dead outside as temperatures plunged between Saturday and Monday morning, though the cause of their deaths remained under investigation.
In Emporia, Kansas, police searching with bloodhounds found a 28-year-old teacher dead and covered in snow. Police said she had was last seen leaving a bar without her coat and phone.
Police said snowplows backed into two people who died in Norwood, Massachusetts, and Dayton, Ohio. And authorities said two teenagers, one in Arkansas and another in Texas, were killed in sledding accidents.
Officials reported three deaths apiece in Louisiana, Pennsylvania and Tennessee; two deaths in Mississippi; and one in New Jersey.
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Mamdani’s mother filmmaker Mira Nair’s name appears in 2009 mail in Epstein Files
New Delhi: The controversial documents of the late sex racketeer Jeffrey Epstein continue to throw up surprises with their string of names of famous people, the latest name being that of renowned filmmaker and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s mother Mira Nair.
A fresh set of documents related to the ‘Epstein Files’ was reportedly released by the US Department of Justice on Friday and includes an email which was sent by publicist Peggy Siegal to Epstein in 2009. The email is learned to describe the publicist leaving an afterparty organized at the Manhattan townhouse owned by Ghislaine Maxwell following an event tied to Nair’s 2009 film Amelia.
In the email sent early-morning on October 21, 2009, Seigal is said to have written, “Just left Ghislaine’s townhouse after party for film,” adding that former US President Bill Clinton, founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos and Nair were present at the afterparty.
The mail has also reportedly includes comments on Nair’s new film, which is a biographical drama starring Hillary Swank as the aviator Amelia Earhart and Richard Gere as her husband, publisher George Putnam.
The US Justice Department on Friday released over three million pages of documents, including 2,000 videos and 1,80,000 images, on Epstein.
The sex trafficker, who was also a former financier, allegedly committed suicide while in a New York jail in 2019 and awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges. Ghislaine Maxwell was later convicted for her role in assisting Epstein’s abuse of underage girls.
