by A powerful arctic gust will bring “dangerously cold freezing temperatures” to the Northeast through Saturday night along with blizzard conditions in northern Maine, forecasters warned.
“Temperatures will be 10 to 30 degrees below average in parts of the Northeast to the mid-Atlantic coast,” the National Weather Service said in a bulletin early Saturday.
Wind chill warnings and advisories are in place throughout New York state and New England, he said.
The weather service added that the strong winds could cause power outages and damage property on the northern front of the Rocky Mountains and High Plains.
It comes after temperatures reached dangerously low levels across the region on Friday. At New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Observatory, where a wind chill of minus 101 degrees Fahrenheit It was recorded.
Elsewhere, schools in Boston and Worcester, Massachusetts, New England’s two largest cities, were among those closed Friday over concerns about the risk of hypothermia and frostbite for children walking to school or waiting for the bus.
With the weather service forecasting wind chills of minus 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit for northern Massachusetts on Saturday, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu declared a state of emergency through Sunday and opened warming centers to help those most of 650,000 city residents to cope with the situation.
In Southwick, Massachusetts, outside Springfield, a storm is blamed for the death of a baby who was killed when winds toppled a falling tree, hitting the vehicle the baby was riding in. The baby’s mother, 23, sustained serious injuries. The baby’s gender and age were not immediately available.
In New York, a “Code Blue” alert was activated signaling freezing temperatures and the opening of emergency shelters.
Single-digit temperatures and wind chills of 10 to 15 below are forecast for the city and suburbs Saturday morning, the National Weather Service office in New York said.
More than 11,000 properties in New York state lost power early Saturday morning and more than 5,000 in Maine, according to the website poweroutage.us.
As the Northeast sheltered, Texas and parts of the South were beginning to heat up after a deadly winter ice storm brought days of freezing rain, sleet and ice, causing massive power outages and dangerously icy roads.
However, “snow will move into parts of California overnight on Saturday,” the weather service said, adding that on Sunday another round of heavy snowfall will hit the Sierra Nevada mountains from Saturday night into Sunday.
