A system of winter storms across the U.S. has killed several people, left millions of people without power and left a mess for transportation officials to clean on millions of miles of public roadways.
The Associated Press reported on Tuesday that storms killed 16 people, four of whom in Houston who were caught in a fire that was being used to stay warm.
Four-million homes and businesses are still without power more than a day after a blizzard brought snow and ice to a region that rarely deals with winter weather.
According to PowerOutage.us, 4.1 million people throughout Texas are still without power. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the regulatory body for electricity in the state, still has Texas under a Level 3 Alert — the agency’s highest emergency level.
ERCOT is still rotating blackouts throughout the state in the hopes of conserving energy levels. It’s unclear how long those rotating outages will continue to last.
Snow and ice storms blew through the state on Sunday night into early Monday morning. But while the precipitation is gone, frigid temperatures remain. Much of the eastern and northern parts of the state will continue to see freezing temperatures for the next few days.
On Monday, officials in Houston said that two men had died alongside a local highway in what they suspect were deaths caused by freezing temperatures, according to the Associated Press. Official causes of death have not yet been released.
Two others in the city — an adult woman and a female child — died of carbon monoxide poisoning when they ran the car in their garage to keep warm. A man and a boy in the same family were hospitalized.
In nearby Louisiana, officials say a man was killed when he slipped on ice and struck his head. Tennessee has also reported at least two storm-related deaths.
In North Carolina, the same storm system produced a deadly tornado that killed three people and injured 10 others
Elsewhere in the U.S., the Weather Channel reports that a man died in an accident with a snowplow in Boone County, Missouri and the Associated Press two people died in separate crashes on Kentucky expressways.
In Kentucky, thousands of people are without power after heavy ice storms froze the eastern part of the state. PowerOutages.us reports that about 150,000 people in the state — most of them in the mountainous region in the east — are currently without electricity.
Those outages extend over the border into West Virginia, where an additional 100,000 people — half of them in the city of Huntington alone — are without power.
Much of the Midwest and Ohio Valley will remain in a deep freeze on Tuesday, with temperatures remaining in the 20s.
