- Rising Temperatures Show Climate’s Hidden Impact on Substance Use Neuroscience News
- How climate change is fueling alcohol-related hospitalizations Grist
- Is there anything climate change can’t do? Now scientists say global warming is causing rising drug and alcoho Daily Mail
- The association between temperature and alcohol- and substance-related disorder hospital visits in New York State | Communications Medicine Nature.com
- Hotter Temperatures From Climate Change Could Increase Drug And Alcohol Hospitalizations, Researchers Suggest Forbes
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Tag Archives: temperatures
Passengers aboard Las Vegas flight pass out while awaiting takeoff in triple digit temperatures – Fox Business
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California’s Death Valley sizzles near record temperatures as brutal heat wave continues – PBS NewsHour
- California’s Death Valley sizzles near record temperatures as brutal heat wave continues PBS NewsHour
- Tourists flock to Death Valley to feel hottest heat ever recorded | DW News DW News
- Air Quality Alert and Marginal Risk for Severe Weather Sunday. Scorching Heat in U.S. Southwest WGN TV Chicago
- Is it safe to walk your dog in hot weather? Here are the risks pets face in California heat wave Sacramento Bee
- Death Valley National Park approaches world record temperature during heat wave | LiveNOW from FOX LiveNOW from FOX
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As ice storm continues in the South, the Northeast braces for dangerously frigid temperatures
CNN
—
As tens of thousands remain without power in Texas on Thursday amid frigid temperatures and icy roads, the Northeast is bracing for a blast of bitterly cold air that could feel well below freezing.
Texas has been bearing the brunt of a dangerous ice storm that dumped several rounds of sleet and freezing rain, causing life-threatening road conditions in surrounding states including Oklahoma, Arkansas and the Memphis area in Tennessee.
On Wednesday, Texas reported a third person had died during the storm after losing control of her truck on an icy road north of Eldorado. One person was killed in Austin in a 10-car pileup, and another person died after their car rolled over in the Dallas-area city of Arlington, officials said.
And while Thursday is expected to bring some relief from the deadly storm as temperatures slowly rise, the piling of multiple layers of ice and sleet has snapped tree branches and limbs and led to power outages for more than 360,000 homes and businesses in Texas. That means thousands of people likely don’t have proper heating or hot water as ice coats the ground.
Overnight into early Thursday, an additional quarter inch of ice could possibly glaze already slippery roads, particularly in central and northern Texas, southern Oklahoma and Arkansas.
“This will bring storm total ice accretions to over 0.5” for many locations which will raise the risk for significant tree damage and power outages, in addition to icy, dangerous roads. Sleet may also mix in at times with the freezing rain which will increase the chances for icing on the roadways,” the National Weather Service said.
By late Thursday night, the Northeast could begin feeling temperatures below zero from a separate winter storm, prompting officials in several states to announce preparations.
In Connecticut, the governor activated the state’s severe cold weather protocol beginning noon Thursday through the weekend.
“With the kind of severe cold weather that is headed our way, frostbite can develop on exposed skin in under 30 minutes. Spending long periods of time outdoors in these conditions is not only harmful, it can be fatal,” Gov. Ned Lamont said.
The governor added that shelters and warming centers are available across Connecticut, and transportation can be provided when needed.
Similarly, warming centers are expected to be available in Maine, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Vermont, officials said.
In Boston, the mayor declared a cold emergency in the city for Friday through Sunday ahead of the severely cold weather.
“I urge all Boston residents to take precautions, stay warm and safe, and check on your neighbors during this cold emergency,” Mayor Michelle Wu said.
More than 15 million people are expected to be under a wind chill watch or warning in the Northeast beginning either Thursday night or Friday morning through at least Saturday afternoon.
The National Weather Service issues a wind chill warning when the air is expected to feel -25 degrees Fahrenheit or colder.
The impending wind chill alerts would apply to all of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, northern Connecticut, much of eastern and central New York and northeast Pennsylvania.
“The air mass descending on the area Friday into Friday night is the coldest air currently in the Northern Hemisphere,” National Weather Service in Caribou, Maine, warned.
The cold air is on a path to move into the Northeast Thursday night and Friday, with the coldest period coming Friday night and Saturday morning, as temperatures fall below zero.
The northern portion of New England will see temperatures drop to 15 to 25 degrees below zero. Plus, the frigid temperatures will be joined by winds of 25 to 40 mph, making air in areas as far south as New York City feel -10 degrees Fahrenheit.
“Avoid any outdoor activities on Friday and Saturday! Cold temperatures paired with the wind chill factor could lead to potentially life-threatening conditions outdoors,” the New Hampshire Homeland Security and Emergency Management said in a post on Facebook Wednesday afternoon.
Meanwhile, northern New York and northern New England will feel like -35 to -50 degrees Fahrenheit with some locations experiencing wind chills as cold as 65 degrees below zero. These extreme conditions can cause frostbite in as little as five minutes.
The cold blast is expected to be brief, with temperatures rising across most of the region by Sunday afternoon.
‘The Last of Us’ Come Alive: Fungi Are Adapting to Warmer Temperatures
Dangerous fungal infections are on the rise, and a growing body of research suggests warmer temperatures might be a culprit.
The human body’s average temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit has long been too hot for most fungi to thrive, infectious-disease specialists say. But as temperatures have risen globally, some fungi might be adapting to endure more heat stress, including conditions within the human body, research suggests. Climate change might also be creating conditions for some disease-causing fungi to expand their geographical range, research shows.
“As fungi are exposed to more consistent elevated temperatures, there’s a real possibility that certain fungi that were previously harmless suddenly become potential pathogens,” said
Peter Pappas,
an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Deaths from fungal infections are increasing, due in part to growing populations of people with weakened immune systems who are more vulnerable to severe fungal disease, public-health experts said. At least 7,000 people died in the U.S. from fungal infections in 2021, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said, up from hundreds of people each year around 1970. There are few effective and nontoxic medications to treat such infections, they said.
Photos: What We Know About Deadly Fungal Infections
In the video game and HBO show “The Last of Us,” a fungus infects people en masse and turns them into monstrous creatures. The fungus is based on a real genus, Ophiocordyceps, that includes species that infect insects, disabling and killing them.
There have been no known Ophiocordyceps infections in people, infectious-disease experts said, but they said the rising temperatures that facilitated the spread of the killer fungi in the show may be pushing other fungi to better adapt to human hosts and expand into new geographical ranges.
A January study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that higher temperatures may prompt some disease-causing fungi to evolve faster to survive.
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Researchers at Duke University grew 800 generations of a type of Cryptococcus, a group of fungi that can cause severe disease in people, in conditions of either 86 degrees Fahrenheit or 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The researchers used DNA sequencing to track changes in the fungi’s genome with a focus on “jumping genes”—DNA sequences that can move from one location on the genome to another.
Asiya Gusa, a study co-author and postdoctoral researcher in Duke’s Molecular Genetics and Microbiology Department, said movement of such genes can result in mutations and alter gene expression. In fungi, Dr. Gusa said, the movement of the genes could play a role in allowing fungi to adapt to stressors including heat.
Dr. Gusa and her colleagues found that the rate of movement of “jumping genes” was five times higher in the Cryptococcus raised in the warmer temperature.
Cryptococcus infections can be deadly, particularly in immunocompromised people. At least 110,000 people die globally each year from brain infections caused by Cryptococcus fungi, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Candida auris, a highly deadly fungus that has been reported in about half of U.S. states, also appears to have adapted to warmer temperatures, infectious-disease specialists said.
“Fungi isn’t transmitted from person to person, but through fungal spores in the air,” Dr. Gusa said. “They’re in our homes, they’re everywhere.”
An analysis published last year in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases said some potentially deadly fungi found in the soil, including Coccidioides and Histoplasma, have significantly expanded their geographical range in the U.S. since the 1950s. Andrej Spec, a co-author of the analysis and an associate professor of medicine at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said warming temperatures, as well as other environmental alterations associated with climate change, could have played a role in this spread.
Cases of Coccidioidomycosis or Valley fever, a disease caused by Coccidioides, were once mostly limited to the Southwest, Dr. Spec said. Now people are being diagnosed in significant numbers in most states. Histoplasma infections, once common only in the Midwest, have been reported in 94% of states, the analysis said. Histoplasma is also spread through bat droppings and climate change has been linked to changing bat migration patterns, Dr. Spec said.
The World Health Organization has identified Cryptococcus, Coccidioides, Histoplasma and Candida auris as being among the fungal pathogens of greatest threat to people.
“We keep saying these fungi are rare, but this must be the most common rare disease because they’re now everywhere,” Dr. Spec said.
Write to Dominique Mosbergen at dominique.mosbergen@wsj.com
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Greenland temperatures hottest in 1,000 years: Study | Climate Crisis News
A new study of Greenland’s ice cores indicates that rising temperatures bear the ‘clear signature of global warming’.
New data has revealed that temperatures in Greenland are the warmest they have been in 1,000 years, underscoring the growing impact of human-driven climate change on the natural world.
A study published in the scientific journal Nature on Wednesday found that temperatures have risen 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 20th-century average since 1995. The data shows that Greenland’s ice cores — samples taken from deep within ice sheets and glaciers — have warmed substantially.
“We keep on [seeing] rising temperatures between the 1990s and 2011,” said the study’s lead author Maria Hoerhold, a glaciologist at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany. “We have now a clear signature of global warming.”
As fossil fuel consumption releases carbon into the atmosphere and warms the planet, scientists have warned that governments have yet to make the changes needed to avert the worst repercussions of global warming.
In November, a United Nations report found that many of the world’s most famous glaciers could disappear by 2050 as the planet warms. Of the more than 18,600 glaciers the organisation monitors across 50 World Heritage Sites, about one-third are expected to vanish by mid-century.
Another study found that two-thirds of the world’s glaciers are expected to disappear by 2100.
Greenland’s ice cores, which reveal information about long-term temperature changes, take time to analyse. Data from the cores had last been updated in 1995 and previously suggested that Greenland was not warming as quickly as the rest of the Arctic region.
However, the newly analysed cores, taken in 2011, show a sharp rise over the last 15 years.
“This is an important finding and corroborates the suspicion that the ‘missing warming’ in the ice cores is due to the fact that the cores end before the strong warming sets in,” said climate scientist Martin Stendel of the Danish Meteorological Institute, who was not involved in the research.
Hoerhold said that natural weather variability and undulations caused by an occasional weather system called “Greenland blocking” had previously hidden the toll of human-caused climate change.
But in the 1990s, that change became too large to ignore. Past data showed Greenland warming at a lower pace than the rest of the Arctic, which was warming four times faster than the global average. Now, Greenland appears to be catching up.
The ice cores are used to create a chart approximating temperatures in Greenland over a more than 1,000-year timeframe, stretching from the years 1000 to 2011.
For the first 800 years, the temperatures slowly cooled, then edged up and down before a dramatic spike in the 1990s. Hoerhold said that there is “almost zero” chance that the post-1995 spike is attributable to a factor other than climate change.
Another set of ice cores was taken in 2019, but Hoerhold said they are still being studied.
The study also revealed that more water is being released as Greenland’s ice melts, contributing to rising sea levels.
“We should be very concerned about North Greenland warming,” said Danish Meteorological Institute ice scientist Jason Box. “Because that region has a dozen sleeping giants in the form of wide tidewater glaciers and an ice stream.”
Temperatures on Greenland haven’t been this warm in at least 1,000 years, scientists report
CNN
—
As humans fiddle with the planet’s thermostat, scientists are piecing together Greenland’s history by drilling ice cores to analyze how the climate crisis has impacted the island country over the years. The further down they drilled, the further they went back in time, allowing them to separate which temperature fluctuations were natural and which were human-caused.
After years of research on the Greenland ice sheet – which CNN visited when the cores were drilled – scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature that temperatures there have been the warmest in at least the last 1,000 years – the longest amount of time their ice cores could be analyzed to. And they found that between 2001 and 2011, it was on average 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than it was during the 20th century.
The report’s authors said human-caused climate change played a significant role in the dramatic rise in temperatures in the critical Arctic region, where melting ice has a considerable global impact.
“Greenland is the largest contributor currently to sea level rise,” Maria Hörhold, lead author of the study and a glaciologist with the Alfred Wegener Institute, told CNN. “And if we keep on going with the carbon emissions as we do right now, then by 2100, Greenland will have contributed up to 50 centimeters to sea level rise and this will affect millions of people who live in coastal areas.”
– Source:
CNN
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CNN
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Greenland: Secrets in the Ice — Part 5
07:57
– Source:
CNN
Weather stations along the edge of the Greenland ice sheet have detected that its coastal regions are warming, but scientists’ understanding of the effects of rising temperatures there had been limited due to the lack of long-term observations.
Understanding the past, Hörhold said, is important to prepare for future consequences.
“If you want to state something is global warming, you need to know what the natural variation was before humans actually interacted with the atmosphere,” she said. “For that, you have to go to the past – to the pre-industrial era – when humans have not been emitting [carbon dioxide] into the atmosphere.”
During pre-industrial times, there were no weather stations in Greenland that gathered temperature data like today. That’s why the scientists relied on paleoclimate data, such as ice cores, to study the region’s warming patterns. The last robust ice core analysis in Greenland ended in 1995, and that data didn’t detect warming despite climate change already being apparent elsewhere, Hörhold said.
“With this extension to 2011, we can show that, ‘Well, there is actually warming,’” she added. “The warming trend has been there since 1800, but we had the strong natural variability that has been hiding this warming.”
Before humans began belching fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere, temperatures near 32 degrees Fahrenheit in Greenland were unheard of. But recent research shows that the Arctic region has been warming four times faster than the rest of the planet.
Significant warming in Greenland’s ice sheet is nearing a tipping point, scientists say, which could trigger catastrophic melting. Greenland holds enough ice that if it all melted, it could lift global sea levels by roughly 24 feet, according to NASA.
Although the study only covered temperatures through 2011, Greenland has seen extreme events since then. In 2019, an unexpectedly hot spring and a July heat wave caused almost the entire ice sheet’s surface to begin melting, shedding roughly 532 billion tons of ice into the sea. Global sea level would rise by 1.5 millimeters as a result, scientists reported afterward.
Then in 2021, rain fell at the summit of Greenland – roughly two miles above sea level – for the first time on record. The warm air then fueled an extreme rain event, dumping 7 billion tons of water on the ice sheet, enough to fill the Reflecting Pool at Washington, DC’s National Mall nearly 250,000 times.
With these extreme events in Greenland happening more often, Hörhold said the team will continue to monitor the changes.
“Every degree matters,” Hörhold said. “At one point, we will go back to Greenland and we will keep on extending those records.”
Winter storm causes power outages, hits Americans with snow and freezing temperatures before Christmas
A frigid winter storm has swept across the country, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses and leaving millions of people on edge about the possibility of blackouts over the Christmas holiday weekend.
The storm unleashed its full fury on Buffalo, New York, with hurricane-force winds causing whiteout conditions. Emergency response efforts were paralyzed, and the city’s international airport was shut down.
CBS News has confirmed at least 20 weather-related deaths from the storm nationwide. At least three people died in the Buffalo area, including two who suffered medical emergencies in their homes and couldn’t be saved because emergency crews were unable to reach them amid historic blizzard conditions.
As millions of Americans were traveling ahead of Christmas, more than 3,400 flights within, into or out of the U.S. were canceled Saturday, and another 1,300 as of 7 a.m. ET Sunday, according to the tracking site FlightAware. Airlines were playing catch-up with crew shortages and de-icing slowing the return to normal, CBS News correspondent Naomi Ruchim reported. In Seattle, an ice storm shut down multiple runways.
John Normile / Getty Images
As of Saturday night, at least 345,000 customers were without power nationwide, according to the outage tracking site PowerOutage.us. Of those, more than 170,000 were in the New England region.
Deep snow, single-digit temperatures and day-old power outages sent Buffalo residents scrambling Saturday to get out of their houses to anywhere that had heat. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said the Buffalo Niagara International Airport would be closed through Monday morning and almost every fire truck in the city was stranded in the snow.
“No matter how many emergency vehicles we have, they cannot get through the conditions as we speak,” Hochul said.
Forecasters said 28 inches of snow had already accumulated as of Saturday in Buffalo — part of an area that saw 6 feet fall just over a month ago, resulting in three deaths. More is expected overnight.
Erie County Executive Mark Poloncarz said the blizzard may be “the worst storm in our community’s history.” He said it was taking ambulances over three hours to do one trip to a hospital. Plows were on the roads, but large snow drifts, abandoned cars and downed power lines were slowing progress.
John Normile/Getty Images
Blinding blizzards, freezing rain and frigid cold also knocked out power in places from Maine to Seattle, while a major electricity grid operator warned the 65 million people it serves across the eastern U.S. that rolling blackouts might be required.
Pennsylvania-based PJM Interconnection said power plants are having difficulty operating in the frigid weather and has asked residents in 13 states to conserve electricity through at least Christmas morning. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides electricity to 10 million people in the state and parts of six surrounding ones, directed local power companies to implement planned interruptions but ended the measure by Saturday afternoon. The start of the NFL’s Tennessee Titans’ game in Nashville was delayed an hour by a planned power outage.
PJM Interconnection, which covers all or parts of 13 states and and Washington, D.C., also warned rolling blackouts might be required.
In North Carolina, 169,000 customers were without power Saturday afternoon, down from a peak of more than 485,000, but utility officials said rolling blackouts would continue for “the next few days.”
Those without power included James Reynolds of Greensboro, who said his housemate, a 70-year-old with diabetes and severe arthritis, spent the morning bundled beside a kerosene heater with indoor temperatures “hovering in the 50s.”
In Jackson, Mississippi, officials Saturday said the city’s water system – which partially collapsed in late August – was experiencing “fluctuating” pressure on Saturday afternoon amid frigid temperatures.
Some residents in Mississippi’s capital city may temporarily experience low water pressure, officials warned. Leading up to the “arctic blast” that brought dangerously cold air to Jackson, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba warned that the city’s the water distribution system remained a “huge vulnerability.”
Ticket prices at Soldier Field in Chicago Saturday plummeted faster than the temperature, with some seats going for $10 on third-party sites to see the Bears take on the Buffalo Bills. The temperature at kickoff was 9 degrees, with a minus-12 wind chill. It was Buffalo’s coldest road game by temperature since at least 1967.
In Montana, it’s been minus 40 degrees or worse for much of the week, with ranchers attempting to keep their cattle safe.
On the Ohio Turnpike, four died in a massive pileup Friday involving some 50 vehicles. A Kansas City, Missouri, driver was killed Thursday after skidding into a creek, and three others died Wednesday in separate crashes on icy northern Kansas roads.
A utility worker in Ohio was also killed Friday while trying to restore power, a company said. Buckeye Rural Electric Cooperative said the 22-year-old died in “an electrical contact incident” near Pedro in Lawrence County.
A woman in Vermont died in a hospital Friday after a tree broke in the high winds and fell on her. Police in Colorado Springs said they found the dead body of a person who appeared to be homeless as subzero temperatures and snow descended upon the region. In Madison, Wisconsin, a 57-year-old woman died Friday after falling through the ice on a river, the Rock County Sheriff’s Office announced.
In Lansing, Michigan, an 82-year-old woman died after being found Friday morning curled up in the snow outside of her assisted living community, Bath Township police reported. A snowplow driver found the woman as temperatures hovered around 10 degrees.
Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear said one person died in a traffic accident attributed to the weather in western Kentucky and a homeless person died in Louisville.
Along Interstate 71 in Kentucky, Terry Henderson and her husband, Rick, were stuck in a massive traffic jam caused by several accidents for 34 hours. The truck drivers weathered the wait in a rig outfitted with a diesel heater, a toilet and a refrigerator but nonetheless regretted trying to drive from Alabama to their home near Akron, Ohio, for Christmas.
“I wish we should have stayed,” said Terry Henderson, after they got moving again Saturday. “We should have sat.”
The storm was nearly unprecedented in its scope, stretching from the Great Lakes near Canada to the Rio Grande along the border with Mexico. About 60% of the U.S. population faced some sort of winter weather advisory or warning, and temperatures plummeted drastically below normal from east of the Rocky Mountains to the Appalachians, the National Weather Service said.
In Mexico, migrants camped near the U.S. border in unusually cold temperatures as they awaited a U.S. Supreme Court decision on pandemic-era restrictions that prevent many from seeking asylum. Dozens of migrants were also living and sleeping on streets of the Texas border city of El Paso in subfreezing temperatures waiting for shelters to open. Most were donning donated winter clothing they received from empathetic local residents and volunteers,
Forecasters said a bomb cyclone — when atmospheric pressure drops very quickly in a strong storm — had developed near the Great Lakes, stirring up blizzard conditions, including heavy winds and snow.
Western New York often sees dramatic lake-effect snow, which is caused by cool air picking up moisture from the warm water, then dumping it on the land. But even area residents found conditions to be dire on Christmas Eve.
Latricia Stroud said she and her two daughters, 1 and 12, were stranded without heat or power in their Buffalo house since Friday afternoon, with the snow too deep to leave.
“I have to go over a snowbank to get out,” Stroud told the AP. “There’s a warming center, I just need a ride to get there.”
A prolonged winter storm delivers power outages, snarled travel and frigid temperatures on Christmas Day
CNN
—
A nearly weeklong winter storm blasting much of the US has plunged temperatures to life-threatening lows, brought blizzards and floods, and left more than a quarter million people without power on Christmas Day.
Blizzard conditions continue across the Great Lakes, while frigid cold temperatures grip the eastern two-thirds of the US, with some major cities in the Southeast, Midwest and East Coast recording their coldest Christmas in decades.
Large areas of the central and eastern US remain under wind chill warnings and advisories, as freeze warnings are in effect across the South.
New York City saw record cold temperatures on Christmas Eve at several locations, including its JFK and LaGuardia airports. The high at Central Park was 15 degrees, marking its second-coldest December 24 in at least 150 years, according to the National Weather Service.
At least 22 deaths have been attributed to dangerous weather conditions since Wednesday, and some residents in the Northeast are spending the holiday without sufficient heat or hot water as extremely cold temperatures persist.
Across the US, 275,856 homes and businesses in the US had no electricity service as of 1 a.m. ET, many of them in Maine and New York, according to PowerOutage.us. Since the start of the storm the number of outages has at times exceeded a million customers.
A power grid operator for at least 13 states in the country’s eastern half asked customers to conserve power and set thermostats lower than usual from early Saturday to 10 a.m. on Sunday because usage was straining capacity.
The operator, PJM Interconnection, serves about 65 million people in all or parts of Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia, and warned rolling blackouts could happen if the strain becomes too much.
In New York, utility companies Con Edison and Natural Grid US also urged customers to conserve energy, citing extreme weather conditions and increased energy demand on interstate pipelines carrying natural gas into the city.
Meanwhile, a shortage of electricity in Texas prompted the US Department of Energy to declare an emergency Friday, allowing the state’s energy provider to exceed environmental emissions standards until energy usage drops.
In Jackson, Mississippi, frigid temperatures are hampering efforts to repair a large water main break late Saturday, which has caused a loss in water pressure for residents, city officials said.
“We are grateful to the crews who are braving these frigid temperatures on this Christmas Eve night, while working to restore pressure to residents. Their sacrifice does not go unnoticed and is appreciated not only by this administration, but also by every resident who is affected,” the release stated.
The brutal weather conditions have also snarled travel during the busy holiday weekend, with more than 5,000 flights canceled Friday, more than 3,400 flights canceled Saturday, and more than 1,000 canceled for Christmas Day.
Conditions on the road weren’t any better in parts of the country amid whiteout conditions and icy and snow-covered roadways.
In New York’s Erie County – which is seeing blistering blizzard conditions – about 500 motorists found themselves stranded in their vehicles Friday night into Saturday morning, despite a county driving ban put in place during the storm, according to County Executive Mark Poloncarz.
National Guard troops were called in to help “rescue people that are stuck in vehicles,” and to give rides to medical workers so they could relieve colleagues who had been working at hospitals for more than a day, Poloncarz said.
In Seattle, Washington, online videos have documented cars sliding on the icy roads and bumping into each and residents slipping as they walked on sidewalks, CNN affiliate KOMO reported.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Saturday she will ask the federal government “for a declaration of emergency that’ll allow us to seek reimbursements for the extraordinary expenses of all the overtime and the fact that we brought in mutual aid from other parts of the state.”
New York’s three storm-related deaths were reported in Erie County. Two died in separate incidents Friday night when emergency medical personnel could not get to their homes in time for medical emergencies, Poloncarz said Saturday morning. Details about the third death, confirmed by a county spokesperson Saturday afternoon, weren’t immediately available.
“The loss of two lives in Buffalo – storm related – because people were not able to get to medical attention, is again a crisis situation that unfolds before your eyes and you realize that lifesaving ambulances and emergency medical personnel cannot get to people during a blizzard situation,” Hochul added.
Other storm-related deaths have been reported in the country. They include:
• Colorado: Police in Colorado Springs, Colorado, reported two deaths related to the cold since Thursday, with one man found near a power transformer of a building possibly looking for warmth, and another in a camp in an alleyway.
• Kansas: Three people have died in weather-related traffic accidents, the Kansas Highway Patrol said Friday.
• Kentucky: Three people have died in the state, officials have said, including one involving a vehicle accident in Montgomery County.
• Missouri: One person died after a caravan slid off an icy road and into a frozen creek, Kansas City police said.
• Ohio: Eight people have died as a result of weather-related auto accidents, including four in a Saturday morning crash on Interstate 75, when a semi tractor-trailer crossed the median and collided with an SUV and a pickup, authorities said.
• Tennessee: The Tennessee Department of Health on Friday confirmed one storm-related fatality.
• Wisconsin: Wisconsin State Patrol on Thursday reported one fatal crash due to winter weather.
In pictures: Winter storm impacts the US
The storm system is forecast to gradually weaken as it lifts into southeastern Canada, moving slowly during the next couple of days and pulling arctic air from Canada down into much of the eastern side of the country.
The Arctic blast being felt across the eastern two-thirds of the nation will slowly moderate into Monday, but dangerous conditions will persist Christmas Day.
The cold temperatures combined with dangerous wind chills will create a potentially life-threatening hazard for travelers who become stranded, people who work outside, livestock and pets, according to the National Weather Service.
“In some areas, being outdoors could lead to frostbite in minutes,” the Weather Service warned.
As the frigid air continues to blast the warm waters of the Great Lakes, lake-effect snows and blizzard conditions are expected to continue, but slowly become less intense.
Still, strong gusty winds initially up to 60 mph accompanying the snow downwind from the Great Lakes will continue to make for extremely dangerous conditions on the road.
By Christmas night into Monday, another low pressure system coming from the Pacific will deliver the next surge of moisture toward the Pacific Northwest and then into northern California, according to the Weather Service.
PJM urges customers to conserve electricity due to frigid temperatures
VALLEY FORGE, Pennsylvania (WPVI) — Frigid temperatures are having an effect on the power grid.
PJM Interconnection, the local electricity grid operator, is asking customers to conserve energy starting Saturday at 4 a.m. through Sunday at 10 a.m.
Electricity use right now is higher than usual and officials say conservation is important to prevent any power outages.
PJM says some steps you can take to conserve electricity are setting your thermostat lower than usual, if your health permits. Another option is avoid using major appliances like stoves, dishwashers and dryers, and turning off non-essential electric lights and equipment.
PJM says this will ensure adequate power supplies during these frigid temperatures.
PJM Interconnection is the electricity grid operator for 65 million people in 13 states and the District of Columbia.
They will continue to monitor power supply conditions and will do everything possible to keep power flowing.
If necessary, PJM states that they will reduce voltage.
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