As the middle of the nation awoke on Thursday, the deep freeze seemed to have settled in for a long, unwanted visit, disrupting life across an entire region for much of a week, contributing to deaths and injuries, and leaving residents impatient to emerge from their homes and get back to normal.
The grim temperatures and gusty winds lingered in the Midwest, and had spread to the Northeast.
Here are the latest developments:
— Temperatures broke records in some places, and remained low, near record levels, in much of the Midwest on Thursday morning. Minneapolis was minus 23, with a wind chill of minus 38, the National Weather Service said. Chicago was at minus 21, with a wind chill of minus 41. And Milwaukee hit minus 21, with a wind chill of minus 40.
— At least eight deaths have been connected to the Midwest’s dangerously cold weather system, according to The Associated Press, including that of a University of Iowa student who was found behind an academic hall several hours before dawn on Wednesday.
— The sustained cold taxed energy systems across the Midwest, leading to some outages and urgent calls to customers to reduce the heat in their homes.
— Many schools, businesses and restaurants were expected to remain shuttered on Thursday, though some offices were reopening and many more were expected to reopen Friday, when temperatures are expected to rise.
— Airlines have already canceled more than 2,000 flights scheduled for Thursday in the United States, according to FlightAware. On Wednesday, cancellations topped 2,700.
— The East Coast was feeling the bitter cold, too. At 6 a.m. the temperature in New York City hit 2 degrees, but with the wind it felt like 17 below zero.
An Iowa college student is among the dead
In Iowa City, a student at the University of Iowa was found dead in the early morning hours of Wednesday. Gerald Belz, 18 and a pre-med student, was found lying outside, unresponsive, near a campus building after 2 a.m. local time.
He was one of at least eight people whose deaths were believed to be tied to the streak of extreme cold and icy weather in recent days. Among the others were an elderly Illinois man who fell and was found not far from his home; a man who was hit by a snowplow in the Chicago region; a couple in a vehicle crash along snowy roads in Indiana; and a Milwaukee man who the police say was found in his garage and likely froze to death.
Hospitals have treated dozens of frostbite patients
Throughout the Midwest, hospitals reported patients arriving with symptoms tied to the weather. The Illinois Department of Public Health said at least 30 people statewide had been to emergency rooms for frostbite or hypothermia-related visits by Wednesday morning.
At Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, the emergency department reported “many patients” who were injured or ill because of the weather. Frostbite cases alone led to at least 13 admissions.
“It’s busier than it would normally be,” Douglas D. Brunette, an emergency room doctor in Minneapolis, said Wednesday afternoon. “But it’s not a mass casualty incident yet.”
Records were broken, but there is some warmer weather coming
At least two cities in Illinois reached record lows overnight, as a dangerously deep freeze kept its hold on the Midwest.
In Rockford, temperatures dipped to minus 30, breaking a previous record of minus 27 from Jan. 10, 1982. Moline, Illinois, on the border with Iowa, also broke a record, reaching minus 29 on Thursday morning, according to the National Weather Service.
Chicago did not reach a record low overnight — the previous record was minus 27, from Jan. 20, 1985. But the city was expected to be hit with one to three inches of snow on Thursday, beginning in the late afternoon and stretching into the evening.
After several days of brutally cold weather, Chicagoans have something to look forward to, said Matt Friedlein, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
“We’ll be on our way up here soon,” Friedlein said. “In fact, later in the week, it looks like temperatures in the 40s across much of northern Illinois. No matter what, it will be a significant warm up when you consider how cold we are right now.”
Calls to reduce the heat despite the frigid cold
In Minnesota, Xcel Energy asked customers to conserve power and reduce their thermostats to 63 degrees or 60 degrees, depending on their location. Xcel also paid for hotel rooms for customers who lost their gas supply in Princeton, Minnesota, where the temperature on Thursday morning was minus 35.
“Your cooperation is critical to try to prevent widespread natural gas outages,” the company posted on its website.
In Michigan, a fire Wednesday night at a Consumers Energy facility led to fears of a natural gas shortage. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer went on television late at night urging residents of the state’s Lower Peninsula to reduce their thermostats to 65 degrees or less.
“You can play a role in helping people across the state survive these extreme temperatures,” Whitmer said in a statement.
Consumers Energy also asked several manufacturers to halt production because of the natural gas shortage. Erin Davis, a General Motors spokeswoman, said work was stopped on Wednesday night at 11 plants in Michigan. Many workers had been told not to report for their shifts on Thursday.
Schools and colleges close to keep students out of the cold
Schools across a broad section of the nation canceled classes as the dangerous freeze descended, and some said they were pondering canceling classes again Thursday. Many Midwestern institutions lean toward staying open through snowstorms and cold spells, but this one was different. For a second consecutive day, students on Wednesday were told to stay home at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, where there was a forecast high of minus 3, relatively warm compared with other parts of the Midwest.
Hundreds of thousands of younger students in schools across the country’s midsection also had no classes Wednesday.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.