LEILA FADEL, HOST:
More than a dozen states, from the Deep South all the way to New England, are cleaning up after a major winter storm that brought snow, ice and freezing temperatures.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Several deaths are blamed on the storm. Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses are still without power. And airlines are scrambling to get their planes back in the air after canceling thousands of flights.
FADEL: NPR's Joel Rose joins us now with the latest. Hey, Joel.
JOEL ROSE, BYLINE: Hey. Good morning.
FADEL: Good morning. Where did we see the biggest impacts from the storm?
ROSE: Well, the most urgent issue is that there are still a lot of people without power across the South, where this storm brought a huge amount of ice. In some places, the storm was all snow. In others, it turned into sleet and freezing rain. In much of the South, it left a coating of ice on roads and trees. That made roads dangerous, if not totally impassable. It also brought down trees and branches and power lines. That left hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses without power across Tennessee, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Our colleagues at Nashville Public Radio talked to Alejandro Maron (ph), who lives in East Nashville. Let's listen to a bit of what he said.
ALEJANDRO MARON: Trees have been going down everywhere across the neighborhood. And sitting in front of my place, there's been three trees' branches that have come off, so pretty intense.
ROSE: Maron did not have power yesterday - one of more than 300,000 people just in the state of Tennessee, according to the website poweroutage.com. More than 200,000 of those customers were in the Nashville area.
FADEL: And how are states dealing with this?
ROSE: It may take days to get the power back on in parts of the South. Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves says this is the biggest ice storm his state has seen in more than 30 years. At one point last night, Reeves said, 180,000 customers in Mississippi had lost power. That's more than 10% of all utility customers in the state. Reeves said utility crews are working to get that power back on, but conditions are making that tough.
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TATE REEVES: The real challenges that exist in an ice storm is in many areas, it's not safe for our people to be out and about trying to do things because of the amount of ice that is on the road.
ROSE: Reeves also said the problems will not go away just because the precipitation has stopped. Temperatures are forecast to stay below freezing, which means the roads will still be icy, and he urged people to stay off those roads so that emergency crews can do their work. In the meantime, Mississippi and other states in the storm's path have set up dozens of warming centers, but that may not be a big help to people at the most rural areas. You know, and also, we should note the storm had impacts far beyond the South. It dumped more than a foot of snow across a big swath of the country, from Missouri all the way up to Massachusetts.
FADEL: Now, this storm also had a huge impact on air travel. What's the latest there?
ROSE: Yeah. This storm brought much of the nation's aviation industry to a halt. Airlines canceled more than 10,000 flights over the weekend. Sunday was the biggest single day for cancellations since the early days of the COVID pandemic in 2020, according to the aviation analytics company Cirium. The vast majority of flights were canceled at some airports in the Northeast around Washington, D.C., New York and Boston. American airlines canceled more than half of its scheduled flights yesterday - Delta and United, more than 40%. Airlines are likely to cancel hundreds or even thousands of flights again today as they try to get their crews and planes back in position so that they can try to return to regular service later in the week.
FADEL: I have a flight later today. Let's see what happens. That's NPR's Joel Rose. Thank you so much, Joel.
ROSE: Yeah. Good luck. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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