A brutal winter storm closed interstate highways from Arizona to Wyoming Wednesday, trapped drivers in cars, knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of people and prompted the first blizzard warning in Southern California in decades — and the worst won't be over for several days.
Few places were untouched by the wild weather, including some at the opposite extreme: long-standing record highs were broken in cities in the Midwest, mid-Atlantic and Southeast.
Almost 800,000 consumers have been left without electricity in the northeastern part of the United States due to a heavy snow storm, the monitoring service poweroutage.us said.
According to outage tracker PowerOutage.US, Michigan saw more power outages than any other state as of about 9:00 p.m. ET Thursday – followed by over 38,000 outages reported in Illinois and more than 33,000 outages seen in Wisconsin.
More than 94,000 outages were reported in Wayne County, home of Detroit, and over 92,000 were reported in Oakland County, per USA TODAY Network's power outage tracker.
More than 82% of energy customers – over 17,000 homes and businesses – were in the dark in Hillsdale County, located in southern Michigan near the Ohio border.
Much of Michigan, particularly the northern part of the state and Upper Peninsula, werunder winter storm warnings and winter weather advisories on Thursday , according to the National Weather Service.
The storm has mostly hit Michigan, where around 730,000 people experienced power outage as of 07:24 GMT on February 24, according to the service. Massive blackouts have also been recorded in Wisconsin, New York and Illinois.
Michigan authorities said that, during the storm, a firefighter was killed by a downed power line on Wednesday night. The western part of the country has also been affected by heavy snow, with around 30,000 consumers in California left with no electricity.
Bad weather conditions and an icy storm also led to the cancellation of over 1,000 flights in the US on Thursday night, according to FlightAware data.
The wintry mix hit hard in the northern U.S., closing schools, offices, even shutting down the Minnesota Legislature.
Travel has been difficult. Airlines delayed or canceled more than 4,200 U.S. flights by Thursday afternoon — up from about 2,000 in the morning — according to the tracking service FlightAware. More than 1,600 U.S. flight cancellations were also reported on Wednesday, when another 5,900-plus flights were delayed across the country.
At Denver International Airport, Taylor Dotson, her husband, Reggie, and their 4-year-old daughter, Raegan, faced a two-hour flight delay to Nashville on their way home to Belvidere, Tennessee.
Reggie Dotson was in Denver to interview for a job as an airline pilot.
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