Body
A second week of biting cold and prolonged outages spread across the eastern half of the United States on Monday, as residents in multiple states worked to recover from more than a week of sub-freezing weather. Temperatures hovered below freezing across much of the northern U.S. from the Dakotas to Maine, with forecasters expecting the chill to return to the Southeast overnight, reaching into parts of northern Florida. In places hit hardest by the prior storm, power problems stretched into days beyond a week.
In Tennessee and Mississippi, more than 70,000 homes and businesses began a second week without electricity after an earlier snow and ice storm damaged power lines and utility poles. In hard-hit Nashville, Terry Miles, who said Monday was his ninth day without power, described living with his wife and their dog in a bedroom insulated with blankets. He said he cooked and heated water outdoors on a propane grill, and that a small generator he received helped run a couple of space heaters.
Miles said of the situation, “We’re roughing it,” adding, “I’ve been camping before and had it easier than this. I feel like Grizzly Adams.”
Health concerns also accompanied the cold. In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday that hypothermia played a role in the deaths of 13 people found dead outside in the bitter cold, citing preliminary findings. He also said more than a dozen other suspected hypothermia deaths were reported in Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina and Texas.
Along the East Coast, the impact of the storm extended beyond power outages. The National Park Service said four unoccupied homes along North Carolina’s Outer Banks collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean since Sunday, and it said a bystander recorded one of the homes toppling into the water. The agency said photos taken by its rangers showed piles of debris along the shoreline in the village of Buxton, where the barrier islands have faced long-running erosion as rising seas swallow land.
In the years leading up to the latest storm, the National Park Service said more than two dozen houses—often built on stilts at the water’s edge—had collapsed since 2020, with most failures occurring during extreme weather. The Outer Banks’ low-lying terrain and coastal conditions made the storm’s high winds and freezing conditions especially destructive.
Farther south, farmers and plant growers watched for warming so they could assess damage to crops. In Florida, where growers sometimes spray water on fruit trees and plants ahead of freezing weather to form a protective layer of ice, fern growers were waiting Monday for that protective coating to melt. The cold over the weekend brought snow flurries to the Tampa–St. Petersburg area, and news accounts described cold-stunned iguanas motionless on the ground.
For fern growers, the timing was tied to the retail calendar. Victoria Register, director of sales and marketing at FernTrust, said it was “just terrible timing,” and described it as “right in the middle of our busiest shipping time of the entire year,” as producers worked to reach retailers ahead of Valentine’s Day on Feb. 14.
In Tennessee, frustrations also focused on the utility response as outages lingered in Nashville. Nashville Electric Service previously said the storm packed more damaging ice than expected and said more than 1,000 linemen from Nashville and seven states worked on repairs, while trees, branches and power lines remained down across the city Monday. The utility said more than 20,000 customers still lacked electricity as of Monday and that outages would not be fully restored until Feb. 9.
Mayor Freddie O’Connell said Monday he was ordering a review of Nashville Electric Service’s storm preparation and response. O’Connell said he met with utility leaders Sunday and afterward told residents the company was “unequipped to communicate about a crisis.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee also criticized the utility in a social media post, writing, “whoever is responsible for this breakdown should be fired.”
As crews worked and residents dug out, the National Weather Service still had several alerts in effect, including a freeze warning through early Tuesday in south Georgia and most of Florida. Snow was also expected Tuesday across parts of Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, West Virginia and Washington, D.C., where low temperatures in the teens (minus 9 C) were forecast this week. In Charlotte, North Carolina’s largest city, nearly a foot of snow fell over the weekend, and the state’s Transportation Department said late Monday that interstates were essentially clear except for some icy spots while work continued on other roads.
Gov. Josh Stein said in a news release that his administration was working “around the clock” to clear roads and return people to daily life quickly and safely, and that the pace was slow because temperatures were expected to remain low overnight.