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.
— 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 remained 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.”
Temperatures are plunging in the Northeast, too
Officials in New York and other parts of the Northeast warned residents to prepare for temperatures that, while not nearly as cold as the Midwest, could still be dangerous.
In Vermont, Rhode Island and Connecticut, where it was expected to dip into the single digits or lower, officials opened warming centers.
In New York City, where it was 10 degrees at midday, Mayor Bill de Blasio urged people to “bundle up and stay inside as much as possible.” With wind chills expected to fall below zero, city officials warned landlords to provide adequate heat to their tenants.
Conditions were worse in the western part of the state, where Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared a state of emergency in several counties and instructed some state workers to stay home. More than 13 inches of snow fell Wednesday in Buffalo, a record for Jan. 30, and more was falling on Thursday.
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 1 to 3 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.”
Rescuers come to the aid of hundreds stranded in their cars
Car breakdowns and medical emergencies took on greater urgency across the Midwest as police and fire departments dealt with dangerously low temperatures and increased workloads.
The Illinois State Police assisted more than 1,300 drivers over an eight-hour period on Wednesday, about 10 times troopers’ normal workload. In Michigan, where the extreme cold thwarted efforts to treat frozen roadways, emergency workers closed part of Interstate 675 on Thursday after a series of crashes. And in Indiana, a state trooper helped a dog named Marley and its owner warm up after finding them in a stalled car along a highway.
The cold was especially risky for those surrounded by water. The Coast Guard used air boats to rescue seven people stranded in an ice shanty off the coast of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. And on Mackinac Island, Michigan, where the dangerous weather made plane travel impossible, another Coast Guard ship sliced through the ice to rescue a woman needing medical attention.
“The crew responded admirably in adverse conditions to answer the call,” said Lt. Steele Johnson, the commanding officer of the ship that rescued the woman, in a statement. “We’re happy to have done our part in getting her the advanced medical treatment she needed.”
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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.