US freeze shows no sign of weekend melt

A layer of ice and sleet up to three inches thick is expected to stay on roads in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex through Sunday, forecasters said, after what some say is the worst winter weather to hit the United States in years.

On Friday, ice snarled travel and knocked out power for hundreds of thousands of people.

The freeze stretched from the Texas-Mexico border northeast to the Ohio Valley, with the most severe conditions near Dallas, punching through Arkansas and western Kentucky, according to forecasters at AccuWeather.com.

Residents of large cities and small towns were without power as broad outages were reported through Texas, Arkansas and Louisiana, local utilities said.

‘The lingering frigid air will not only lay the path for more ice this weekend, but will also delay recovery in communities dealing with widespread power outages and thus no heat,’ AccuWeather.com meteorologist Meghan Evans said in an email. At the height of the storm, some 267,000 outages were reported in the Dallas-Fort Worth area alone, according to utility provider Oncor, but that number was down to about 200,000 late on Friday.

Nearly 5,000 customers in Tennessee and roughly 30,000 in Arkansas were without power, energy companies said on Friday. More than 1,900 flights were canceled on Friday, according to online flight trackers. First-time air traveller Madison Cunningham, 18, was stranded for more than 12 hours in the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport when ice prevented her flight home to Indianapolis.

‘I’m never going to fly again,’ said Cunningham. ‘I’ll take the train next time.’ The Texas airport said airlines cancelled more than 750 departures scheduled for Friday, leaving some 4,000 passengers to spend the night sleeping on cots. The travel troubles also delayed commerce, as United Parcel Service, the nation’s largest package delivery company, said that deliveries have been disrupted in Arkansas, Missouri, New Mexico and the panhandle portion of Texas on Friday.