Tens of thousands of people entered their sixth day with no electricity Friday as the Carolinas and Virginia were preparing for a significant winter storm that could bring more snowfall than some parts of North Carolina have seen in years.
The National Weather Service said arctic air moving into the Southeast will cause already frigid temperatures to plummet into the teens (minus 10 degrees Celsius) on Friday night in cities like Nashville, Tennessee, where many people still lacked power nearly a week after a massive storm dumped snow and ice across the eastern U.S.
More than 230,000 homes and businesses were without electricity Friday morning, with the vast majority of those outages in Mississippi and Tennessee, according to the outage tracking website poweroutage.us.
Forecasters say the subfreezing weather will persist in the eastern U.S. into February and there’s high chance of heavy snow in the Carolinas, Virginia and northeast Georgia this weekend, possibly up to a foot (30 centimeters) in parts of North Carolina. Snow is also possible along the East Coast from Maryland to Maine.
On Saturday night and early Sunday, forecasters expect intense winds accompanied by moderate to heavy snow that could lead to blizzard conditions for a time before the storm starts to move out to sea Sunday morning.
