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Huge winter storm leaves at least a dozen dead and many without power

A woman braces herself from high winds and snow while crosses a street in Chicago, on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. A sprawling winter storm is moving into the eastern United States and Canada on Friday, knocking out electricity to more than a million customers and upending holiday travel. (Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times) (JAMIE KELTER DAVIS)
A woman braces herself from high winds and snow while crosses a street in Chicago, on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. A sprawling winter storm is moving into the eastern United States and Canada on Friday, knocking out electricity to more than a million customers and upending holiday travel. (Jamie Kelter Davis/The New York Times) (JAMIE KELTER DAVIS)
By Victoria Kim New York Times

As large swaths of the country faced record low temperatures and power outages Saturday, western New York continued to endure the worst of a brutal storm that left residents pinned at home, motorists stranded and emergency workers unable to reach many of the harder-hit areas.

The storm, the worst to strike Buffalo, New York, in decades, battered the region overnight with winds exceeding 70 mph, and by Saturday morning more than 6 feet of snow had buried houses, businesses and cars.

The region will not see blizzard conditions ease for another 12 to 18 hours, said Jon Hitchcock, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Buffalo office.

“Travel is literally impossible – there’s no way to travel,” he said. “Even emergency vehicles and snowplows are getting stuck.”

Across the country, at least a dozen people have died, and tens of thousands of travelers are spending their Christmas Eve stuck at airports, unable to fly to their holiday destination.

At midday Saturday, hundreds of thousands of people remained without power, especially in areas like Maine, North Carolina and Tennessee.

Much of the United States is experiencing the coldest Christmas Eve in decades, including in places unaccustomed to freezing temperatures, such as parts of Texas, Louisiana and Florida.

The storm continued to snarl travel Saturday, with thousands of flight delays and cancellations, according to FlightAware. The cascading effect of earlier cancellations scrambled travel even at some airports where the weather was not bad.

Several interstate highways were closed in western New York, with travel bans in several counties including Erie, where Buffalo is. Floodwaters, elevated by the storm as well as a new moon, rose in shoreline communities.

In Canada, hundreds of thousands of residents remained without power Saturday morning and hundreds of flights were canceled because of the storm. Every province and territory in the country was under an emergency weather warning.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.