A huge storm brings icy temperatures and canceled flights to a majority of Americans

• By Ashley Ahn/NPR

A historic winter storm is subjecting roughly 60% of the U.S. population to a winter weather advisory or warning Friday, leading to thousands of canceled flights, warming shelters at capacity, and blizzard conditions on the eve of Christmas weekend.

The immense frigid blast is creating hazards from the U.S.-Canadian border to the Gulf Coast, and spans the Pacific Northwest to the East Coast. The National Weather Service estimated more than 200 million people were under some form of winter weather advisory or warning in “one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever.”

“This is not like a snow day when you were a kid,” President Joe Biden said Thursday. “This is serious stuff.”

High winds produced dangerous wind chill readings across the central and eastern U.S. last night, with the wind chill in Denver reaching -36 degrees Fahrenheit and Cheyenne, Wyo., falling to -51 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Our troopers, our highway maintainers, our snowplow drivers have been up all night long,” Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon told NPR Thursday. “They’ve just been doing a phenomenal job and so we’ve got traffic moving again and we feel pretty good about our circumstances.”

More than 3,800 flights within, into, or out of the U.S. were canceled Friday as of 11:30 a.m. ET, according to flight tracker FlightAware. That’s already well past Thursday’s total of 2,685.

“This system will have increasingly widespread impacts to travel going into the busy holiday travel time late this week, along with the potential for power outages from the expected high winds, heavy snows, significant icing and overall increased power consumption in places,” NWS said Friday.

More than 1.5 million homes and businesses suffered power outages Friday morning, according to PowerOutage.us. States hit the worst include North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee.

Across the country, some warming shelters were operating at full capacity.

Denver has three 24-hour warming centers for anyone who needs a warm place to stay. One of them, the Denver Coliseum, reached far past capacity Wednesday night, accommodating 359 people in a space meant for 225, the city of Denver said. All three centers will remain open through noon on Saturday.

The issue of homelessness amid freezing temperatures sparked online conversations about how to get more people off the streets in these dangerous conditions.

“As a public defender, one of the clearest indicators of societal failure was when I’d meet new clients who purposefully got arrested so they’d find some warmth on Rikers Island instead of freezing to death on the street,” Columbia University lecturer and longtime public defender Scott Hechinger wrote on Twitter Wednesday.

Forecasters expect a bomb cyclone, a rapidly intensifying storm created when atmospheric pressure drops quickly, to develop near the Great Lakes. The bomb cyclone will bring blizzard conditions, including heavy snow and high winds.