Some residents reportedly complained that they had no water pressure on Christmas Eve. In Jackson, Mississippi, the water system experienced fluctuating pressure. Some utility companies recommended customers conserve energy as frigid temperatures have overburdened gas pipelines and could lead to more power outages. Lake-effect snows will continue to result in locally hazardous travel conditions for the next couple of days, but conditions are expected to improve slowly.Īs of Sunday evening, electricity was out for tens of thousands of homes and businesses in the northeastern part of the US. Weather forecasts on Sunday showed that much of the eastern US would remain in a deep freeze through Monday before a moderating trend sets in on Tuesday. Washington, D.C., had the coldest Christmas in more than two decades. Nationwide, plummeting temperatures have caused power outages to hundreds of thousands as well as warnings from officials about potentially life-threatening conditions. “Stay home, stay off the roads, and stay safe.” President Joe Biden declared “an emergency exists” in the state of New York and ordered federal assistance to aid state and local response efforts, according to the White House. New York Governor Kathy Hochul tweeted on Monday that “the storm is weakening, but we are not out of the woods yet”. On Monday morning, a “band of heavy lake effect snow” in the Buffalo area was producing 2 to 3 inches of hourly snowfall, with accumulations reaching 6 to 12 inches and as much as 1 to 2 feet in Jefferson and northern Lewis counties, according to the NBC report, which cited a bulletin of the National Weather Service. “It’s been described as a once-in-a-generation storm.” “This has been a very difficult and dangerous storm,” Brown said at a news conference on Monday. Some of those deaths are not included in Erie County’s official tally, Poloncarz said, adding that the county was working to confirm them. While driving bans have been lifted in some communities, one such order remains in place in Buffalo, Poloncarz said, adding the city is “impassable in most areas”, with abandoned vehicles scattered everywhere.Īt least 18 people died in Buffalo, said Mayor Byron Brown on Monday. The bill touches on everything from regulating some retail electricity plans to establishing an energy emergency alert system, but some worry it won’t do enough to make sure all of the state’s natural gas infrastructure is winterized or that penalties won’t be high enough to get gas companies to comply.The 1977 storm was called the “Blizzard That Buried Buffalo”, in which 29 people died, most of them trapped in their vehicles, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Centre. Texas lawmakers are currently considering legislation meant to prevent further blackouts, most of which are contained in Senate Bill 3. The Travis County Medical Examiner’s office has said it is investigating those deaths to determine which can be linked to the freeze. Nearly 90 people died in Travis County that week. The February winter storm left thousands without power in subfreezing temperatures and caused serious damage to people’s homes, leaving some apartment tenants with nowhere to go. The victims included medically vulnerable people with chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease, diabetes and kidney problems, BuzzFeed said. Neighboring states that were hit hard by the winter storm but did not experience the widespread power outages seen in Texas did not show a spike in deaths.” Even the lowest end of the range is almost three times the number officials have acknowledged. “Our best estimate is that 702 people were killed by the storm that week. “Our analysis, reviewed by three independent experts, suggests that between 426 and 978 more people than expected died in Texas in the week ending February 20 alone,” the BuzzFeed report says. That method is known as “excess fatalities” and has been employed during other disasters, like the COVID-19 pandemic, to estimate related death tolls. Using mortality data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, BuzzFeed said it compared the number of deaths from all causes that were reported in Texas during and after the storm with the number of fatalities that are normally reported during ordinary conditions. While Texas officials have confirmed that 151 deaths were related to the freeze in February, the death toll could actually be four or five times higher, according to a BuzzFeed data review.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |