Winter storm leaves drivers stranded, thousands without power
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(NewsNation Now) — In Texas, drivers have been stranded overnight along Interstate 10 near San Antonio following a series of accidents. It is one of the aftereffects of a winter storm that dumped sleet and heavy snow across the Central U.S. this week and left hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power on Friday as icy weather conditions threatened parts of the Plains and New England.
Mike McCorkle has been sitting at a standstill on the Texas highway since 7 p.m. Thursday.
“I’ve been running my engine 15 minutes every hour to try to conserve gas and stay warm. It’s currently 10 degrees on the thermometer in my truck,” McCorkle said on “Morning in America.”
McCorkle said the traffic jam stretches about 20 miles and he estimates that he’s only driven about four miles in 12 hours. He said he has an eighth of a tank of gas left.
NewsNation local affiliate KXAN reported that slick roads caused a 14-car pile-up on Interstate 35 Thursday night, which closed the freeway until around 11 p.m. Only one minor injury was reported in the crash, though.
Along with road conditions disrupting travel, more than 330,000 customers from Texas, Arkansas and Tennessee up through Ohio and into New York were without power, Poweroutage.us reported Friday after an ice storm downed power lines and trees across the area on Thursday.
The storm disrupted flights at major hubs in the U.S. on Friday morning, including airports in New York City, Boston and Dallas.
More snow was forecast, but it was the ice that threatened to wreak havoc on travel in the Northeast before the storm heads out to sea late Friday and Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.
Parts of New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont had snowfall reports of a foot or more Friday morning.
Wind chill warnings remained in effect for Texas and the Great Plains, where temperatures ranging from single digits to below zero Fahrenheit were in the forecast.
Many schools and businesses remained closed Friday in areas hit by the wintry weather because roads remained icy and temperatures never rose above freezing.
As of Friday morning, more than 2,000 flights had been canceled at airports across the country according to flightaware.com.
By Saturday morning, the winter storm is expected to exit the East Coast, but bitterly cold temperatures will remain, the NWS said.