US killer winter storm marches north
15 Feb BBC
The latest snow storm to blanket the US Atlantic coast this winter is
marching north, after being blamed for the deaths of more than two dozen
people.
Doctors are trying to save the baby of a 36-year-old expectant mother
who was killed by a snow plough in New York. A sheriff in Georgia has
“cancelled” Valentine’s Day celebrations because of the bad weather.The
winter has left the Great Lakes of the US Midwest almost completely
frozen for the first time in two decades.
More than 440,000 households were still without electricity by Friday
morning, mainly in Georgia and South Carolina, down from 1.2 million.The
weather system is predicted to taper off as it crawls farther north from
New England.A milder storm is expected to dump up to 3in (7cm) of snow
on the East Coast over the weekend, reports the National Weather
Service.
Road conditions in some areas were still treacherous. Thirty people
were injured, five severely, in a multiple vehicle pile-up near
Philadelphia on Friday morning.Officials said it would take many hours
to clear damaged vehicles, including lorries. The crash spawned a
traffic jam stretching for five miles (8km).
Many schools remained closed in eight states from Virginia to Maine,
while the federal government in Washington DC opened two hours late
after shutting down completely on Thursday.
Almost 1,500 flights were cancelled on Friday, compared with 6,500 a
day earlier. All flights were grounded at Ronald Reagan Washington
National Airport on Thursday.The storm dumped around a foot of snow
across the region, though some areas, such as upstate New York, saw up
to 27in of the white stuff.The weather system, nicknamed Pax by
meteorologists, has been blamed for at least 25 deaths, according to an
Associated Press tally, mainly from road accidents.
Pregnant Min Lin, 36, died after being struck on Thursday by a snow
plough as it reversed outside a shopping centre in Brooklyn, New York
City.She was taken to a hospital, where her nearly full-term baby,
weighing 6lb 6oz, was delivered by caesarean section.The child is in a
critical condition in a neonatal intensive care unit, a hospital
spokeswoman said.No immediate charges were brought against the
driver.The fresh spasm of foul weather has delayed tens of thousands of
deliveries of Valentine’s Day flowers.”It’s a godawful thing,” Mike
Flood, owner of Falls Church Florist in Virginia, told the Associated
Press news agency. “We’re going to lose money. There’s no doubt about
it.”
A sheriff in north-eastern Georgia, meanwhile, said he was cancelling
Valentine’s Day because of the bad weather.In an apparently
tongue-in-cheek Facebook post, Sheriff Scott Berry declared the Oconee
County region a “No Valentines [sic] Day Zone”.He said all men in the
area were exempt from having to buy chocolate or other gifts for their
partners until next Tuesday.It has been a particularly icy winter in the
US, with almost back-to-back bitter cold snaps.
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