Winter storm live updates: Dangerous weather across U.S. proves deadly

As rough weather continued to torment the East Coast, a public transit bus in Philadelphia lost grip and slid backward down a city street, NBC Philadelphia reported tonight.

The Southeastern Pennsylvania Transportation Authority bus splayed out diagonally as its tires searched for traction until it struck a fire hydrant and a parked car and came to a rest in the Manayunk neighborhood, the station said.

SEPTA reported no injuries, the station added. The agency said detours were in effect for some of its bus lines because road conditions were dangerously icy.

The National Weather Service office that serves Philadelphia said the city was likely to get 4 inches of snow overnight.

As people across most of the U.S. turned up the heat and stayed inside amid frigid temperatures, Montana took the title for the coldest temperature in the country today.

An area 13 miles north of Sulphur Springs, Montana, recorded a temperature of minus 42 degrees, the National Weather Service said.

The warmest was near Sunniland, Florida, around 50 miles southeast of Fort Myers, which had a temperature of 85 degrees, according to the agency.

January's arctic blast was both a character and a factor in the NFL postseason over the last few days.

It produced the fourth-coldest NFL game ever for the Kansas City Chiefs' 26-7 win over the normally tropical Miami Dolphins on Saturday night. Then it caused a postponement for the Buffalo Bills-Pittsburgh Steelers game, scheduled just as the worst of the cold spell, including single-digit temperatures and snow, arrived yesterday.

The rescheduled wild card game tonight was no day at the beach, either. The Bills' Highmark Stadium was blanketed in so much powder before the matchup that the team said it had 200 openings for temporary snow shovelers to work starting at midnight before the game for $20 an hour.

It's not clear how that might benefit a home team, but the Bills seemed comfortably in command for much of the game — despite the Steelers' own cold weather bona fides. Fans did their part, tossing puffs of snow for each Bills score, giving the venue a touch of sparkly, Las Vegas superclub vibes, supplemented by confetti or streamers.

Temperatures when wind chill is factored were near zero, the NFL said. For the Chiefs game, it was an estimated 27 below zero with wind chill included as a factor.

Bills coach Sean McDermott improved his cold weather supremacy to 11-1 in regular season and postseason wins and losses when the kickoff temperature is 32 degrees or colder.

There were 3,071 flights within, into or out of the U.S. that were canceled today, according to a flight tracking website, on a day when there were ground stops at some airports due to the winter weather gripping the country.

The most canceled flights were at Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, where 509 arriving or departing flights were canceled, according to the website FlightAware.

Second-most was also in Texas, at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, with a combined 441 cancellations, according to the site.

Both airports said that the weather was affecting travel and causing planes to de-ice. They advised passengers to budget extra time.

It was 22 degrees in the Dallas-Fort Worth area at around 7:30 p.m. local time, but the wind chill made it feel like 7 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.

Houston was 26 degrees with a wind chill of 14 degrees, the weather service said.

Weather has been blamed in two more deaths in the South today.

A person was killed overnight in a crash on Highway 49 in Humphreys County, Mississippi, just south of Silver City, the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency said in a statement.

Additional details were unavailable.

The agency urged motorists to keep vehicles parked amid temperatures in the 20s and "ice on roads and bridges" in multiple counties, according to the state Transportation Department.

The state Health Department reported a weather-related death in Shelby County, home to Memphis, but did not provide additional details.

At least seven deaths are confirmed to have been related to the weather since Friday, when successive winter storms began to strike amid an arctic blast and expanded to cover states from the West to the Plains, the Midwest to the South.

The toll is likely to grow as officials confirm the storms and weather played a role in deaths.

A backcountry skier was killed yesterday in an avalanche he may have triggered in Prater Canyon, Wyoming, according to the Bridger-Teton Avalanche Center.

The center's director, Frank Carus, said the skier had been with someone else on snowmobiles before exploring the area on skis.

The survivor said he heard an avalanche nearby, Carus wrote in an accident report, so the pair sought safety several hundred feet away. The deceased "diverted from intended route and triggered a soft slab, 2-3' thick and 50' wide" that ultimately buried the person under 2 feet of snow and debris, according to an earlier summary.

The survivor quickly rescued his partner and then performed 1½ hours of CPR in an unsuccessful attempt to revive the skier, Carus said.

The pair were pulled from the area by helicopter because it was too dangerous to reach them by ground, Carus said.

The area, near the Idaho boundary and about 60 miles south of Grand Teton National Forest, was the subject of a high danger warning from the center, according to its reports.

It is the third avalanche death in the 2023-24 winter, according to the Colorado Avalanche Information Center.

On Thursday, a backcountry skier was killed in Shoshone County, Idaho; the previous day, a 66-year-old visitor to Palisades Tahoe ski resort in Olympic Valley, California, was killed when a slide described by authorities as 10 feet deep enveloped multiple park users and injured one.

Four campers who became trapped were rescued in Kentucky today, Gov. Andy Beshear said as he urged residents to be careful and make good decisions amid a winter storm with very low temperatures.

The four people rescued by helicopter from the Red River Gorge are OK, Beshear said.

“We want to make sure that everyone is safe, that everyone is making good decisions,” Beshear said at a news conference.

He warned of “very, very low temperatures,” especially tomorrow morning, when forecasters predict a minimum wind chill of zero to minus 10 degrees. Even tomorrow morning, wind chills are predicted to be a minimum of 5 to minus 5 degrees.

“It is so cold and will be so cold that it is tough for the salt and other treatments for the roads to work — meaning roads can be slick anywhere throughout Kentucky,” Beshear said.

He urged people to drive slow and carefully and said that if they must travel they should have emergency kits.

“Remember, you can be slower, doing everything that you can, and there could be a backup caused by another accident, and that emergency supply kit could be the difference in you being comfortable and being very uncomfortable or even needing help,” Beshear said.

A 59-year-old Arkansas man died and a woman with him was injured in a crash yesterday northeast of Little Rock, according to a state Department of Public Safety report.

The crash happened at 2:09 p.m. on Highway 13 in White County, after the driver’s Ford F250 truck left the snow-covered road and crashed into a tree, according to the report.

A cause of the crash was not listed. Conditions were listed as snow on the roadway.

Most of the snow has moved out of Arkansas, the National Weather Service said late this afternoon. Little Rock got 2.4 inches yesterday. White County is around 30 miles northeast of the city.

In Utah, where almost 4 feet of snow fell in the mountains over 24 hours, a snowmobiler was struck and killed last night by a semitrailer about 70 miles southeast of Salt Lake City, according to the Utah Highway Patrol.

The person who was killed was among four snowmobilers who were trying to cross U.S. Highway 40 in the Strawberry Reservoir area.