The brutal polar air that has made the Midwest shiver over the past few days spread to the East and the Deep South on Tuesday, shattering records that in some cases had stood for more than a century.
The mercury plunged into the single digits and teens from Boston and New York to Atlanta, Nashville, Tenn., and Little Rock, Ark. — places where many people are unfamiliar with extreme cold.
The Midwest and the East were colder than much of Antarctica on Tuesday morning, and Alabama was as cold as parts of Alaska.
All 50 states saw freezing temperatures at some point Tuesday. That included Hawaii, where it was 18 degrees atop Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano.
The big chill started in the Midwest over the weekend, caused by a kink in the the strong winds that circulate around the North Pole, known as the polar vortex. Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn and Indiana Gov. Mike Pence issued disaster declarations and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency.
By Tuesday, the icy air covered about half the country, and records were shattering like icicles up and down the Eastern Seaboard.
It was 1 degree in Reading, Pa., and 2 in Trenton, N.J. New York City plummeted to 4 degrees; the old record for the date was 6, set in 1896.
“It’s brutal out here,” said Spunkiy Jon, who took a break from her sanitation job in New York to smoke a cigarette in the cab of a garbage truck. “Your fingers freeze off after three minutes, your cheeks feel as if you’re going to get windburn, and you work as quick as you can.”
Farther south, Birmingham dipped to a low of 7, four degrees below the old mark for Jan. 7, set in 1970. Huntsville, Ala., dropped to 5, Nashville got down to 2, and Little Rock fell to 9. Charlotte, N.C., reached 6 degrees, breaking the 12-degree record that had stood since 1884.
The deep freeze dragged on in the Midwest as well, with the thermometer reaching minus 12 overnight in the Chicago area and 14 below in suburban St. Louis. More than 500 Amtrak passengers were stranded overnight on three Chicago-bound trains that were stopped by blowing and drifting snow in Illinois. Food ran low, but the heat stayed on.
The worst should be over in the next day or two, when the polar vortex is expected to straighten itself out. Warmer weather — that is, near or above freezing — is in the forecast for much of the stricken part of the country.
On Tuesday, many schools and day care centers across the eastern half of the U.S. were closed so that youngsters wouldn’t be exposed to the dangerous cold. Officials opened shelters for the homeless and anyone else who needed a warm place.
With the bitter cold slowing baggage handling and aircraft refueling, airlines canceled more than 2,000 flights in the U.S., bringing the four-day total to more than 11,000.
In New Orleans, which reported a low of 26 degrees, hardware stores ran out of pipe insulation. In Pensacola, Fla., a Gulf Coast city better known for its white sand beaches than frost, streets normally filled with joggers, bikers and people walking dogs were deserted Tuesday. A sign on a bank flashed 19 degrees. Patches of ice sparkled in parking lots where puddles froze overnight.
The Lower 48 states, when averaged out, reached a low of 13.8 degrees overnight Monday, according to calculations by Ryan Maue of Weather Bell Analytics. An estimated 190 million people in the U.S. were subjected to the polar vortex’s icy blast.
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PJM Interconnection, which operates the power grid that serves more than 61 million people in the Mid-Atlantic, Midwest and South, asked users to conserve electricity because of the cold, especially in the morning and late afternoon.
Across the South, the Tennessee Valley Authority said power demand in the morning reached the second-highest winter peak in the history of the Depression-era utility. Temperatures averaged 4 degrees across the utility’s seven-state region.
In South Carolina, a large utility used 15-minute rolling blackouts to handle demand, but there were no reports of widespread outages in the South.
Natural gas demand in the U.S. set a record Tuesday, eclipsing the mark set a day earlier, according to Jack Weixel, director of energy analysis at Bentek Energy.
In Chicago, it was too cold even for the polar bear at the Lincoln Park Zoo. While polar bears can handle below-zero cold in the wild, Anana was kept inside Monday because she doesn’t have the thick layer of fat that bears typically develop from feeding on seals and whale carcasses.
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