Winter storm lashes much of US South, East Coast

What happened

A massive winter storm rolled across much of the U.S. over the weekend, hitting states from New Mexico to Maine with sleet, snow and freezing rain. “It is a unique storm in the sense that it is so widespread,” National Weather Service meteorologist Allison Santorelli told The Associated Press. “We’re talking like a 2,000-mile spread.” She said about 213 million people were under some sort of winter weather warning on Sunday.

Who said what

The “colossal” storm’s “map of misery was vast and varied,” The Washington Post said, knocking out power to “more than a million customers,” prompting “widespread school cancellations” and causing “deaths in multiple states.” More than 11,000 flights were canceled Sunday, and thousands more had been scrapped Monday.

Communities in upstate New York “saw record-breaking subzero temperatures” as low as minus 49 F, the AP said, while “freezing rain that slickened roads and brought trees and branches down on roads and power lines were the main peril in the South.” The power outages “hit hardest in Tennessee, where about 300,000 customers lost power,” mostly in Nashville, The Wall Street Journal said. The Nashville Electric Service said the outages could “span over days or longer.”

What next?

Much of the snowfall ended last night, “but frigid temperatures should keep things icy for the rest of the week,” the Journal said. “The snow and the ice will be very, very slow to melt and won’t be going away anytime soon, and that’s going to hinder any recovery efforts,” Santorelli told CBS News.