Southern US enters second week of biting cold and prolonged outages
Published:Monday | February 2, 2026 | 3:49 PM
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — Four homes blasted by icy winds on an eroding North Carolina island collapsed into the ocean and Florida farmers anxiously waited for frozen plants to thaw Monday as people across the eastern half of the United States coped with more than a week of sub-freezing weather.
Thermometers hovered below freezing throughout the day Monday across the northern US from the Dakotas to Maine, and sub-freezing temperatures were forecast to return to the Southeast overnight, reaching into parts of northern Florida.
As residents of the Carolinas and Virginia dug out from deep snow, more than 70,000 homes and businesses in Tennessee and Mississippi began a second week without electricity since an earlier snow and ice storm inflicted severe damage on power lines and utility poles.
In hard-hit Nashville, Tennessee, Terry Miles said Monday was his ninth day without power.
Miles said he has been living with his wife and their dog in a bedroom that he tried to insulate by hanging up blankets.
He’s cooking and heating water outdoors on a propane grill. On Sunday someone loaned him a small gas generator with enough power to run a couple of space heaters.
“We’re roughing it,” Miles said. “I’ve been camping before and had it easier than this. I feel like Grizzly Adams.”
The death toll has surpassed 110 in states afflicted by the dangerous cold since January 24.
In New York City, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday that hypothermia played a role in the deaths of 13 people found dead outside in the bitter cold, according to preliminary findings.
More than a dozen other suspected hypothermia deaths were reported in Indiana, Louisiana, South Carolina and Texas.
On the East Coast, where a weekend bomb cyclone brought heavy snow and fierce winds, the National Park Service said four unoccupied homes along North Carolina’s Outer Banks collapsed into the Atlantic Ocean since Sunday.
A bystander recorded one of them toppling into the water. Photos taken by the agency showed piles of debris along the shoreline in the village of Buxton.
The Outer Banks’ narrow, low-lying barrier islands have been eroding for years as rising seas swallow the land. Prior to the latest storm, more than two dozen houses, usually built on stilts at the water’s edge, had collapsed since 2020.
Most fell in extreme weather.
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