The Arctic front, which blanketed more than half of US territory in snow and ice over the Christmas weekend, has gradually eased this Sunday, although the week begins with temperatures below freezing in the country’s northwest as well. Nearly thirty severe weather deaths — seven of them in northwest New York — more than 1.6 million homes without power, and nightmare days in airline travel with thousands of cancellations are the major traces left by a storm, which the National Weather Service ( NWS, in its English acronym) is described as historical. As for the death toll, many of whom were trapped in their vehicles by the snow, NBC News put the tally at 28, while CNN reports a total of 26.
Though the snow spared the Big Apple, Northwest New York state spent Christmas Eve under a seven-foot ceiling as the country’s largest utility texted all its customers in the state advising them to lower the temperature on the thermostat to conserve energy.” Extreme cold, high demand and interstate distribution problems causing shortages in natural gas supplies.” Under bright sunshine that lasted all weekend, New York City experienced a temperature drop of 50 degrees between early Friday morning and Saturday morning, according to traditional measurement in the Central Park. The thermometer in the Big Apple hadn’t fallen that much since January 2019.
Although the Arctic front is weakening as it makes its way east, the northwest half of the country is still “extremely dangerous to travel in these conditions,” the NWS recalled. As of this Sunday afternoon, nearly 200,000 people were on alert for a snow storm, most of them in upstate New York. On Christmas Eve it was four million, nationwide more than 200 million. Buffalo Airport in the state’s northwest remains closed, although the number of canceled flights is lower than in previous days at fewer than 3,000, according to tracking website Flight Aware. Milwaukee (Wisconsin) Airport is also closed.
Power, which left more than 1.5 million homes without lights between Friday and Saturday, has been mostly restored, and as of midday this Sunday, only about 260,000 users were without service, according to data from Internet Power Outage.
The NWS dubbed Thursday’s winter storm an arctic air mass, or polar vortex — a large, rotating mass of cold air that often circles the Arctic but occasionally drifts south of the pole, historically. “A storm that only happens once in a generation,” the weather service said.
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The commentator’s anger and his viral video
The anecdote of a weekend marked by traffic chaos and celebrations behind closed doors was the impromptu live coverage of an Iowa sports commentator who was forced by his network to narrate from the street during an endless live program, beneath the snowfall , the bad weather to the storm. Mark Woodley, a sports reporter for KWWL News 7, NBC’s local station in Waterloo, Iowa, was literally pushed onto the street, where he repeatedly went live. As a video that soon went viral shows the reporter was increasingly irritated, says the Axios portal. When the host from the studio asked him how it was feeling on the road, Woodley replied, “Same as eight minutes ago when you asked me the same question… It’s amazing Ryan,” he replied in an annoyed tone.
“What better time to ask the athlete to get up about five hours earlier than usual, to expose themselves to the wind, snow and cold, and to tell other people not to do that,” Woodley said. “It’s been a really long show, can I return to my post?” He then tweeted a clip of the live broadcast with the message: “This is what happens when you ask the athlete to cover a snowstorm for a morning show.” The video has racked up seven million views, although it’s not known if the reporter received a reprimand – or congratulations – from his bosses. Yes, his comments earned him the name of netizen’s favorite weatherman.
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