US forecasters warned on Thursday of “potentially crippling impacts across central and eastern” parts of the country, producing widespread disruption to travel and utilities over the holiday season, as an arctic blast surged from west to east.
About 200 million people in the lower 48 states were under extreme weather alerts as a freezing air mass sent temperatures into a nosedive, said Bob Oravec, a forecaster with the National Weather Service (NWS) in College Park, Maryland.
An NWS advisory said the “powerful winter storm” would “produce widespread disruptive and potentially crippling impacts across the central and eastern United States”.
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