A powerful winter storm sweeping the US South has grounded more than 2,000 flights, halted passenger trains and threatens the region with heavy snowfall.
As of 7:15 a.m. New York time, 2,043 flights around the US were canceled, more than 590 of them passing through the critical Atlanta Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and another 523 through nearby Charlotte-Douglas airport, according to FlightAware. In addition, Dallas area airports, hit hard Thursday, had an additional 541 flights scrubbed Friday.
“Flying into any of the airports in this region wouldn’t be ideal today,” said Allison Santorelli, a forecaster with the US Weather Prediction Center.
The winter storm rolled out of the Gulf of Mexico and has brought a wide area of up to 9 inches (23 centimeters) of snow across the Texas Panhandle, eastern Oklahoma and central Arkansas since Thursday, Santorelli said. It will keep piling up snow through Tennessee and into the southern Appalachian Mountains, while coating central Georgia, including Atlanta, with ice.
The system also sparked power outages with 71,800 customers without electricity in Arkansas and Texas, according to PowerOutage.us.
In addition to delays in air traffic, federally-funded passenger-rail carrier Amtrak has canceled several trains across Texas and the South, including the iconic City of New Orleans and Texas Flyer. Atlanta’s MARTA will operate buses and trains on a weekend schedule and will halt streetcar service, the agency’s website said.
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