Chris Dobry walked out of his home and came face-to-face with downed trees and thick ice covering power lines in his neighbourhood of Greenwood, Mississippi.
“No power, lines down, and trees are literally breaking apart.”
He told CNN that it “may take days” to get electricity back.
In the meantime, he has been using his gas fireplace for heat.
More than 15 storm and cold-related deaths were reported across several states, including Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and South Carolina.
Some have been attributed to hypothermia, while others were associated with snow shovelling, officials say.
Ice from the storm has caused major power outages across the southern US, particularly in Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Tennessee.
Meanwhile, over 200 million people are under cold alerts for frigid temperatures that will linger for days.
The brutal cold is setting new record daily lows in the Plains.
More records are expected to fall in the South and East as the cold lasts through at least this week.
The most significant infrastructure damage was across a swath of the South, where ice made roads slick, snapped tree limbs and weighed down power lines.
Northern Mississippi and Nashville, Tennessee, in particular, are looking at prolonged recovery periods due to the number of downed trees and power lines.
Hundreds of thousands of electric customers have regained power, according to tracking website poweroutage.us, a drastic improvement from the million customers who suffered from outages at one point.
But more than half a million customers remained in the dark, including over 190,000 in Tennessee, over 140,000 in Mississippi and over 100,000 in Louisiana.
Trees and power lines that are still standing could still snap in the coming days under the continued strain of the ice itself.
Half an inch of ice, which 12 states recorded during this storm, can add as much as 500 pounds of weight to power lines.
High winds can also push trees and power lines to their breaking point.
Wind gusts up to 40 km/h are possible in parts of the Southeast.
The breadth of the storm means much of the country is dealing in some way with its aftermath. Snow was on the ground for just over 56 per cent of the Lower 48 states, and at least a foot of snow fell in 18 states, stretching from New Mexico up and over to Maine.
Travel by road will be treacherous, while air travel will be nearly ground to a halt on Sunday.
Flight cancellations are expected to return to near-normal levels on Tuesday, although full recovery will take several days as carriers work to reposition aircraft and crews.
Several major school districts closed or turned to virtual learning on Monday due to the storm, and some will remain closed on Tuesday due to inclement weather or road conditions. Students in Dallas, Memphis and Nashville will not have class Tuesday.
Other districts – like Baltimore City Public Schools and Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools – will have a remote learning day Tuesday.
‘Devastating’ ice damage in Mississippi, Tennessee
The Weather Prediction Centre had warned before the storm of “catastrophic ice accumulation,” and that forecast held up for parts of the South.
Repairs and restoration to electrical infrastructure in northern Mississippi will be “prolonged” due to widespread damage and unsafe conditions, Northeast Mississippi Electric Power Association (NEMEPA) Chief Executive Keith Hayward said in a social media post.
“The damage to the trees and vegetation is devastating,” Hayward said.
Around 24,000 NEMEPA customers, more than 75 per cent of its customers, were still without power in northern Mississippi as of midday Monday, according to PowerOutage.US.
The storm has snapped poles and downed lines across the area.
Hayward said this storm was worse than Mississippi’s historic 1994 ice storm, when outages took 23 days to restore.
While modern upgrades may speed repairs compared with 1994, Hayward warned that restoration won’t be quick.
Crews temporarily stopped work overnight for safety.
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves announced Monday that he would be deploying about 500 members of the state’s National Guard in the aftermath of the storm.
“We’ll be focusing on logistics, mainly: getting water, food to distribution points, whether it be by wheeled vehicles or by air, if need be,” said Major General Bobby Ginn, the adjutant general of Mississippi.
In Tennessee, this storm marked the highest number of outages at one time in the Nashville Electric Service’s history, with a peak of 230,000, the utility said in a Monday morning update on X.
It surpasses the 200,000 outages reached during the damaging May 2020 derecho, which was one of the utility’s largest outages on record for the city.
The company said it had restored power to 60,000 customers in the Nashville metro area on Monday morning, but another 175,000 were still without power.
Nashville residents should be prepared to potentially go without power for up to a week, said Brent Baker, executive vice president and chief operations and innovations officer of the Nashville Electric Service.
“This is going to be a historic event,” Baker told CNN’s Isabel Rosales on Monday. “Maybe a 20- or 30-year memory for most of us as we’ll look back at this.
This is going to be something that will go down in history and be significant for our customers.”
The electricity service had deployed about 400 line workers to respond to 153 broken poles as of midafternoon Monday.
“This will be a weeklong event at a minimum that we’re going to be working on this, but we think if we make it through today’s cold weather and the trees continue to fall … we’ll start to make more progress as the days continue on,” Baker said.
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