By Rich McKay and Hannah Lang
ATLANTA (Reuters) – The rare deep freeze in the wake of an historic winter storm that swept across the U.S. South this week will linger through Sunday, leaving the region in the grip of extreme cold and ice and creating dangerous driving conditions.
The cold stretched from Houston through New Orleans and Florida’s Panhandle to the coast of the Carolinas, stranding travelers on closed highways and bringing cities to a near standstill since Tuesday, with snow, sleet and freezing rain.
The winter storm pushed out to sea overnight after leaving record-breaking snow accumulations across the region.
In Milton, Florida, on the state’s Panhandle, 9 inches (23 cm) of snow fell, while New Orleans was buried under 8 inches, and 9 inches piled up on parts of North Carolina’s Outer Banks.
Yancy Roberts, a clerk at Freret Hardware store in New Orleans, said he walked 8 blocks to work on Thursday morning through piles of snow, sliding on ice and taking one fall on “black ice” he didn’t see.
“The city ain’t thawed out yet,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow it will.”
A winter wonderland of images appeared online, showing children making snow angels in Savannah, Georgia, and using kayaks as sleds in Pensacola, Florida. In Charleston, South Carolina, icicles hung from the ubiquitous Spanish moss that drapes over tree limbs throughout the South.
Kameron Tanner, a 27-year-old Florida native who works at the Vice Society coffee shop in Tallahassee, said she had never seen a snowstorm of this scale before in the area.
“A lot of it melted already, but it’s still super slippery,” she said. “Everybody’s kind of slipping and sliding around here.”
Even areas where temperatures crept above freezing on Wednesday remain dangerous for travelers as the snow melt refroze overnight, creating slippery roads for travelers unaccustomed to driving in such conditions, the National Weather Service reported.
“Even today, with temperatures in those areas inching toward the 40s, that snow and ice will refreeze as temperatures drop back into the 20s on Friday,” said meteorologist Richard Hurley of the NWS’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.
Records for cold were tied or broken all over the South on Thursday, Hurley said.
In Augusta, Georgia, the mercury plunged to 16 degrees F (-8.8 C), tying a record for this day set in 1874. Tallahassee, Florida’s capital city, was a frigid 21 degrees F; Mobile, Alabama, was 19 and Gulfport, Mississippi was 23. Temperatures in the 60s or low 70s are more typical in those locations, he said.
The subfreezing temperatures should ease by Sunday, he said.
Scores of schools were closed across the Deep South, including Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Travel delays were easing but more than 1,200 flights were either canceled or delayed in the U.S. early on Thursday, according to the tracking site Flightaware.com.
At least a dozen people died in the weather, officials reported, with five people perishing after a multi-vehicle accident in Zavala County in western Texas on Tuesday, and at least 7 people dying from exposure to the cold in Texas, Alabama and Georgia.
(Reporting by Rich McKay in Atlanta and Hannah Lang in New York; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
