Winter storm’s icy blast hits 200 million in US

Some 200 million Americans are feeling the icy grip of a massive winter storm that has been linked to at least 12 deaths ahead of the holiday weekend, reports BBC. 

More than 1.5 million people lost power and thousands of flights were cancelled on Friday.

In South Dakota, some snowed-in Native Americans reportedly burned clothes for warmth after running out of fuel.

In Canada, Ontario and Quebec were bearing the brunt of the storm, with power cuts for hundreds of thousands.

Much of the rest of the country, from British Columbia to Newfoundland, is under extreme cold and winter storm warnings.

A bomb cyclone, when atmospheric pressure plummets, brought blizzard-like conditions to the Great Lakes on the US-Canada border.

The vast storm spans 2,000 miles (3,200km) from Texas to Maine, and the National Weather Service (NWS) said its Friday map "depicts one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever".

Temperatures in Elk Park, Montana, dropped to -50F (-45C) while the town of Hell, Michigan, has frozen over.

The community is covered in several inches of snow and it was 1F (-17C) there on Friday night.

Emily, a bartender at Smitty's Hell Saloon, told the BBC: "It's pretty cold here, but we're having a hell of a time."

Heavy snowfall was forecast in areas of Pennsylvania and Michigan. Buffalo, New York, was expecting at least 35in (89cm).

Coastal flooding has been seen in New England, New York and New Jersey.

In the Pacific Northwest, some residents have been seen ice-skating on frozen streets in Seattle and Portland.

Even the usually milder southern states of Louisiana, Alabama, Florida and Georgia were experiencing hard-freeze warnings.

A number of the storm-related fatalities have involved road traffic accidents, including a 50-car pile-up in Ohio that left at least one person dead.

Travel problems across the country were being exacerbated by a shortage of snow plough operators, with low pay blamed.

More than 8,000 flights were cancelled on Friday, reported tracking site FlightAware, wreaking yet more travel chaos as travellers battle to make it home for Christmas.

By Friday evening 1.2 million customers had no electricity across the US, according to PowerOutage.us.

Utilities throughout the Tennessee Valley were implementing rolling blackouts to save power.

The National Weather Service says more than 100 daily cold temperature records could be tied or broken over the next few days. Decades-old records have already been matched:

• Denver, Colorado, dropped to -24F on Thursday, its lowest point since the 1990s. Craig McBrierty, 34, who is originally from Scotland, but now lives in Denver, told the BBC it is "colder than I have ever experienced"

• Wichita, Kansas, recorded its coldest wind chill (-32F) since 2000

• Nashville, Tennessee, saw its temperatures plunge to below zero for the first time in 26 years

• Casper, Wyoming, set a new record low on Tuesday of -42F

New York, West Virginia, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina and Oklahoma have declared states of emergency, while Wisconsin declared an "energy emergency".

In South Dakota, some Native American tribe members have run out of fuel and food and are trapped by massive snow drifts.

"We're fighting a losing battle," Oglala Sioux Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out told the BBC. He said it was unclear how many of the tribe's 46,000 members were trapped across the 4,200 sq mile region.

Machinery is failing as diesel fuel turns to gel in the freezing cold. Some rescuers are using horses and sleds, or walking.

Anna Halverson, who represents the Pass Creek District on the Pine Ridge Reservation, told the Darsha Dodge Rapid City Journal: "We're in a really extreme emergency down here."

"We have drifts as high as some houses that stretch 60, 70 yards at a time."

She said one family had run out of infant formula, food and fuel and spent four days trapped inside before walking eight miles to get help because their baby was starving.

"I've seen across the reservation some members were burning clothes in their wood stove because they couldn't get access to wood," Ms Halverson said.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has activated the state's National Guard to haul firewood from a nearby national forest to the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and the Oglala Sioux Tribe.