Powerful US storms create blizzard conditions, threaten to spawn more tornadoes

In Mississippi, two people died due to the severe weather, Gov Tate Reeves said Tuesday in a social media post without going into detail. WAPT-TV reported that one person died from a falling power line in Madison County, while a driver in the same county was killed by a tree falling on his car.

A workers walk outside a damaged warehouse after storms moved through, in Lewisville, Texas. (AP Photo)

On Wednesday morning, Nebraska officials warned that travel was not advised in the eastern part of the state, where high winds were limiting visibility. A 209-kilometre stretch of Interstate 80 was closed from Greenwood to Grand Island, according to the Nebraska Department of Transportation.

Blizzard conditions in parts of southern Minnesota made travel there dangerous Wednesday morning, the weather service office in the Twin Cities warned on social media. Heavy snow and strong northerly winds slowed travel across much of the Twin Cities, southern Minnesota and western Wisconsin, the weather service said.

The storms have left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity service on Wednesday morning across the central and southeastern United States, including more than 1,11,000 customers in Texas, about 54,000 in Tennessee and about 53,000 in Alabama, according to PowerOutage.us.

After more than 850 flights were cancelled nationwide on Tuesday, the storm was beginning to snarl traffic at some of the nation’s busiest airports on the East Coast, which typically causes ripple effects throughout the nation’s commercial aviation system.

Nearly 500 flights scheduled to fly into or out of US airports on Wednesday have been cancelled, according to FlightAware.com, which tracks cancellations and delays nationwide.