Dallas: Freezing weather in the US gripped parts of Texas and Arkansas yesterday, with hundreds of thousands of people coping in the cold without power after a winter storm made roads impassable and caused severe flight delays.
More than 3,300 travellers were forced to sleep on cots overnight at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, where workers had managed to thaw only two of its seven runways by last morning.
Airlines cancelled more than 350 flights from DFW that were scheduled for yesterday, the airport said in a statement.
At the height of the storm, some 267,000 electricity outages were reported in Texas, according to utility provider Oncor, but that number was down to about 130,000 early yesterday. Oncor said it hoped to get power restored to nearly all of its customers by tonight.
Icy conditions were expected to last through the weekend from Texas to Ohio to Tennessee, and Virginia officials warned residents of a major ice storm likely to take shape today, resulting in power outages and hazards on the roads.
In California, four people died of hypothermia in the San Francisco Bay area and about a half-dozen traffic-related deaths were blamed on the weather in several states. More than 100,000 customers in the Dallas area were without power yesterday, with about 7,000 in Oklahoma and thousands of more in other states.
Meanwhile, around seven inches of snow fell in northeast Arkansas and the Missouri boot heel, according to the National Weather Service in Memphis, and eight to nine inches fell in parts of southern Indiana. The storm dumped a foot of snow and more in some areas of Illinois.
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