Emergency crews dispatched to ice-covered highways in Mississippi worked overnight and into Wednesday morning to clear stranded vehicles as the eastern U.S. endured what forecasters said could become its longest period of freezing cold in decades.
Traffic was snarled on Interstate 55 and other major highways in northern Mississippi, Gov. Tate Reeves said in a social media post. He said crews were still working Wednesday morning and urged people to stay off the roads. The Mississippi National Guard sent soldiers equipped with wreckers to help.
Sheets of ice coated a stretch of I-22 and neighboring Highway 178 on Wednesday morning outside the cafe where Lacey Clancy was working in the small community of Red Banks, Mississippi. She said cars and trucks sat idle, covering the highways and backing up along on ramps and exit ramps.
“The highway kind of looks like a parking lot,” Clancy said in a phone interview. “A lot of people have run out of gas, abandoned their vehicles.”
Local authorities were asking residents with all-terrain vehicles to bring water, food, blankets or gas to stranded motorists, she said.
Most of the eastern U.S. was still grappling with frigid weather days after a weekend storm blasted the Northeast and parts of the South with snow and ice.
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More than 380,000 homes and businesses, most of them in Mississippi and Tennessee, remained without electricity, according to the outage tracking website poweroutage.us. And at least 50 people had been reported dead in states afflicted by the dangerous cold.
The toll includes three Texas brothers — ages 6, 8 and 9 — who perished after falling through the frozen surface of a pond in Texas. Another child, a toddler, died at a Virginia hospital after being pulled from a frigid pond Monday, according to local police.
Temperatures in the Midwest and Northeast were forecast to remain well below freezing throughout the day Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.
Residents still shivering in the South were getting little relief. In Nashville, Tennessee, where nearly 100,000 power outages lingered early Wednesday, high temperatures were to rise just above freezing before plunging to 13 F (minus 10 C) overnight.
One Nashville hospital was seeing a spike in patients being treated for carbon monoxide poisoning as people without electricity turned to fuel-burning generators, stoves, gas heaters and fireplaces to warm their homes. At least 48 children exposed to the deadly gas had been treated since Saturday at the emergency department at Monroe Carrell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt, spokesperson Jessica Pasley said.
Forecasters predicted even colder weather for much of the U.S. this weekend. A new blast of arctic air is expected Friday and Saturday from the northern Plains to the Southeast, where meteorologists say record cold could stretch as far as Miami.
The weather service said the prolonged freeze “could be the longest duration of cold in several decades.”
Forecasters said there is an increasing chance of heavy snow this weekend in the Carolinas and parts of Virginia, with more snowfall possible from Georgia to Maine.
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Bynum reported from Savannah, Georgia. Martin reported from Kennesaw, Georgia. Associated Press writers Jonathan Mattise in Nashville, Tennessee, and Sarah Brumfield in Washington contributed to this report.
