A rare blizzard is hitting the US, causing dangerous conditions and disrupting train and plane traffic across much of the country just twenty-four hours before Christmas.

Nearly 240 million people (70% of the population) had received a severe weather warning as of Friday morning local time, according to the US Weather Service (NWS).

Conditions in many states are very dangerous for travel, but millions of Americans took to the roads or rushed to airports to travel ahead of the holidays.

“We stay at home (…) I can’t see anything on the other side of the road,” Jennifer Orlando, from the ban city of Hamburg, told AFP. The thermometer showed -8 degrees Celsius. The woman said that due to the fact that the car crashed into a power pole, the electricity in the area was cut off for about four hours.

More than 1 million Americans were left without electricity at noon, mostly in North and South Carolina, Connecticut and Texas, according to Poweroutage.us.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden urged Americans to “heed the warnings” at the local level and follow the instructions of the authorities, stressing that this storm is “serious.”

In total, about 112 million people are expected to drive at least 80 kilometers from home between December 23 and January 2, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA).

Several US states have already declared a state of emergency, including New York, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Georgia and North Carolina.

“People should stay home, not go out,” Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear told CNN this morning. “Your family wants to see you at home for Christmas, but most of all they want to see you alive,” he added. Due to the snow and high winds, “we could get snowstorms very quickly,” he warned, assuring that the National Guard was already mobilized to deal with any problems.

The governor confirmed that three people died on the roads of Kentucky. At least two people have died in Oklahoma.

Snowfall has been reported in the northern United States, mostly in the Great Lakes region. But forecasters say the weather phenomenon stretches from the Canadian border to the Mexican border and from the Pacific coast in the northwest to the Atlantic in the east.

The low barometric pressure is caused by the collision of two air masses: very cold air coming from the Arctic and tropical air from the Gulf of Mexico. What makes the conditions unusual is that the barometric pressure dropped very quickly this time, in less than 24 hours.

In New York, the thermometer showed around 10°C on Friday morning, but will drop to -10°C by evening. In Chicago, temperatures hovered around -20°C this morning. Sub-zero temperatures have also been recorded far along the Texas coast.

Canada is also bracing for unusually cold temperatures. The weather service issued a storm warning for most of the country. In Alberta (west) and Saskatchewan (central Canada), thermometers showed -40 and -50 degrees Celsius.

Source: APE-MPE, AFP.