Winter weather iced a swath of the United States on Tuesday, causing more than 1,700 flights to be canceled nationwide, bringing traffic to a standstill on a highway across Arkansas and causing crashes that seriously injured two police officers. Law in Texas.
like Blizzard Advancing east on Tuesday, watches and warnings stretched from the western heel of Texas all the way to West Virginia. The Federal Weather Forecasting Center warned that several rounds of mixed precipitation — including freezing rain and sleet — were stored in many areas through Wednesday, meaning some areas could hit multiple times.
Several auto crashes have been reported in Austin, Texas, resulting in at least one death, according to the Austin Fire Department. In Travis County, Texas, which includes Austin, police and sheriff’s deputies have been responding to new incidents about every three minutes since 8 a.m., according to the Austin-Travis County traffic report page.
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More than 900 flights to and from the US’s main Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport and more than 250 flights to and from Dallas Love Field were canceled or delayed Tuesday, according to tracking service FlightAware. In Dallas-Fort Worth, more than 50% of flights scheduled for Tuesday were canceled on Tuesday afternoon.
FlightAware reported that Dallas-based Southwest Airlines canceled more than 560 flights on Tuesday and delayed more than 350 more.
About 7,000 power outages had been reported in Texas as of late Tuesday morning, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said after a briefing in Austin about the deteriorating conditions. He emphasized that the outages were due to factors such as ice on power lines or fallen trees, not the performance of the Texas power grid, which collapsed for several days during a deadly winter storm in 2021.
Fleets of emergency vehicles were deployed among the 1,600 roads affected by the freeze.
In Texas, a second truck hit a sheriff’s deputy who stopped to help the driver of an 18-wheeler that spun off an icy highway on Tuesday, pinning him under one of its tires, according to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. About 45 minutes after the Interstate 130 crash, officials said, the deputy was freed from the rubble and taken to a hospital, where he will undergo surgery Tuesday afternoon. Officials said the deputy was expected to survive.
In another wreck, a Texas trooper was hospitalized with serious injuries after being hit by a driver who lost control of their vehicle, said Steve Macro, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
“The roads are very dangerous right now. We can’t overemphasize that,” Abbott said.
In Arkansas, Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders declared a state of emergency Tuesday because of the ice storm. In her announcement, Sanders noted “the potential for several downed power lines” and said that road conditions had led to a backlog of deliveries by commercial drivers.
One of the main roads through Arkansas — Interstate 40 — was covered in ice and “extremely dangerous” in the Forest City area on Tuesday, according to the city’s fire department. Pictures posted on social media showed the collapsed cab of a semi-trailer.
Division chief Jeremy Sharp said by telephone that the department responded to two bad wrecks and about 15 other accidents Tuesday morning. He said that in many accidents, drivers increase speed on the highway but face problems when they reach the bridge.
“They hit the ice and started destroying,” he said.
“When I-40 gets closed like that, it can be hours of waiting,” said John Gadbury, who lives in Colt, Arkansas, close to the interstate. “I-40 is usually one of the first things to freeze because of its slight altitude.”
By late Tuesday morning, I-40 had cleared and traffic had resumed, the Arkansas Department of Transportation announced. The highway connects Little Rock, Arkansas, and Memphis, Tennessee.
The storm began Monday as part of a forecast “several rounds” of winter rain through Wednesday across Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Tennessee, according to National Meteorologist Marc Chenard.
“In general, light to moderate freezing rain causes very large amounts of ice,” Chenard said.
“We expect ice accumulations likely to be a quarter of an inch or higher as far south as Austin, Texas, all the way to Dallas to Little Rock, Arkansas, toward Memphis, Tennessee, and even as close to Nashville, Tennessee,” according to Chenard.
Flight disturbances follow Southwest collapse in December It started with a winter storm but continued after most of the other airlines had recovered. Southwest canceled about 16,700 flights during the last 10 days of the year, and the US Department of Transportation is investigating.
The weather service issued a winter storm warning for a wide area of Texas and parts of southeastern Oklahoma and a blizzard warning across the midsection from Arkansas to western Tennessee.
A wintry weather warning is in place for most of the remaining parts of Arkansas and Tennessee and in much of Kentucky, West Virginia and southern parts of Indiana and Ohio.
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