WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 — The passage of Winter Storm Elliott, which has battered two-thirds of the United States for several days, has so far killed at least 41 people, media reports.
The deaths were recorded in 12 states: Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska, New York, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Wisconsin, according to a report by NBC News.
The great storm spread from the Great Lakes near Canada to the Rio Grande on the border with Mexico from the middle of last week and still affected more than 60 percent of the country’s population.
About 110 centimeters of snow fell in Buffalo, New York, on Sunday morning, the National Weather Service said.
Snow and snow storms rendered roads impassable where substations also froze, killing at least 12 people, Erie County officials said.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul called the storm the most devastating in Buffalo history because of its power and scale, and its impact unleashed a “crisis of epic proportions.”
The adverse conditions also led to the cancellation of more than 3,300 domestic and international flights in the country on Sunday, with more than 11,000 delays, according to the FlightAward tracking website.
Blinding snowstorms, freezing rain and freezing cold also knocked out power in places from Maine to Seattle, leaving hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power and millions of people facing the possibility of power outages.
In addition, energy-saving appeals were broadcast in a dozen states by utility companies, urging customers to set their thermostats lower than usual as growing demand exhausted capacity.
Reports from specialized facilities from some major cities in the Southeast, Midwest and East Coast reported the coldest Christmases in decades, and Florida, for example, recorded the lowest December 25 temperatures since 1983 for cities from Miami, Tampa, Orlando and West Palm Beach.
Elliott strengthened into a bomb cyclone last Friday, an event that occurs when barometric pressure drops rapidly into a powerful storm, and began to batter the Great Lakes region and the East Coast with high winds, snow and coastal flooding.
The National Weather Service forecast a gradual weakening of the system as it moves up into southeastern Canada, with its impact slowly fading as of today.