(NEW YORK) — The Mega Millions jackpot for Friday is expected to climb to $640 million, after no ticket matched all six winning numbers in Tuesday’s drawing, the lottery said.
“It’s by far the largest Mega Millions prize ever offered in the final week of any year, and could provide someone with a very happy New Year’s celebration,” the lottery said in a statement early Wednesday.
The cash prize option for Friday’s drawing is expected to top $328 million, the lottery said.
The winning numbers on Tuesday were 9, 13, 36, 59 and 61. The megaball was 11 and the megaplier was 2.
Players had also failed to win the top prize on Friday, sending the jackpot from roughly $510 million to $565 million, the second-largest Mega Millions jackpot this year. The cash prize option on Tuesday was $289.8 million.
In July, the jackpot surpassed the $1 billion mark for only the third time in the 20-year history of Mega Millions.
The historic $1.34 billion prize was won by an anonymous ticket owner in Des Plaines, Illinois.
The last winning ticket for a Mega Millions jackpot was on Oct. 14. Two ticket winners split a $502 million prize.
Only six Mega Millions jackpots have been won this year. Winning tickets were in California, Florida, New York, Minnesota, Illinois and Tennessee.
(NEW YORK) — Missing 11-year-old Madalina Cojocari’s parents “clearly” know more than they’ve told investigators, local police said on Tuesday.
The Cornelius Police Department offered an update into the steps it’s taken — with the help of the FBI and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation — in the 12 days since Cojocari was reported missing.
“We know everyone has a lot of questions,” Capt. Jennifer Thompson said in a video posted to Facebook. “We also have questions and are doing everything we can, with proper legal authority, to get those answers.”
She added, “This is a serious case of a child whose parents are clearly not telling us everything they know.”
The FBI last week released a surveillance video that investigators said showed the 11-year-old leaving her school bus on Nov. 21, which they said was the last confirmed sighting of the child.
Her parents told investigators she’s been missing since Nov. 23, but she was reported missing on Dec. 15, according to a police report.
Her parents — mother Diana Cojocari, 37, and stepfather, Christopher Palmiter, 60 — were both arrested on Dec. 17 and charged under a North Carolina law that requires guardians to notify police within “a reasonable time” when a child goes missing.
Each faces a felony charge of failure to report the disappearance of a child to law enforcement, police said in two statements. Both are scheduled to appear on Wednesday morning in Mecklenburg County Court, according to the local sheriff’s website.
Investigators have developed and followed about 250 leads in the 12 days they’ve been searching for the girl, Thompson said on Tuesday. Those leads have been “across state lines and across the globe,” she said.
“We have interviewed hundreds of people in North Carolina, other states, and, again, across the globe,” she said.
Police have knocked at about 245 homes as they’ve gone door-to-door in the Victoria Bay neighborhood around Madalina Cojocari’s home, Thompsons said. Investigators have “scoured” hours of surveillance video from local businesses.
“Investigators received multiple search warrants for Madalina’s home, to make sure we legally gathered each and every piece of evidence to find Madalina,” Thompson said.
Police said the girl’s school reached out to Diana Cojocari “several” times between Nov. 23 and Dec. 15, when the mother reported the girl missing at her school.
“One of the challenges in the case, simply put — we were not notified she was gone, a delay of three weeks,” Thompson said.
Officials have worked to piece together a timeline of Madalina Cojocari’s disappearance, according to an arrest sheet obtained by ABC News affiliate WSOC-TV.
Diana Cojocari told police she’d last seen the girl at about 10 p.m. on Nov. 23, according to the arrest sheet, which was dated Dec. 17.
Diana Cojocari told police “Madalina went to her room that night to go to bed. Diana stated her and her husband, Christopher Palmiter, argued that night and the next morning he drove to his family’s house in Michigan to recover some items,” law enforcement officials wrote in the arrest sheet.
Diana Cojocari said she went to check on her daughter at about 11:30 a.m. on Nov. 24, but the girl wasn’t in her room, according to the arrest sheet. Police said Diana Cojocari told them that she’d waited until Palmiter returned home, at about 7 p.m. on Nov. 26, to ask if he knew where Madalina Cojocari was.
Police “asked Diana why she did not report Madalina missing until” mid-December, and she “stated she was worried it might start a ‘conflict’ between her and Christopher,” officials wrote in the arrest sheet.
Palmiter told police that he’d asked Diana Cojocari where Madalina was when he’d returned from his trip, officials wrote.
“Chris stated he spoke with Diana several time[s] about Madalina’s whereabout[s] over the next three weeks,” the arrest sheet said, “and both stated they did not know where she was but they did not contact the police to report Madalina missing.”
(NEW YORK) — Adam Fox, a militia member who plotted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, was sentenced to 16 years in prison on Tuesday, according to the Department of Justice.
After Fox’s first trial ended in a hung jury, he was found guilty in August of kidnapping conspiracy and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction.
Fox, 39, faced up to life in prison.
“For his role in the plot to kidnap the Governor and trigger further violence, he will serve a long term in prison,” according to a statement from Andrew Birge, the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Michigan who was appointed to oversee the trial. “Responding to domestic terrorism has been a priority for the Department of Justice since its founding. Rest assured: we will spare no effort to disrupt plots like these and hold those responsible accountable.”
Fox and another convicted militia member, Barry Croft Jr., “intended to kidnap Governor Whitmer from her vacation cottage near Elk Rapids, Michigan” in 2020 and use “destructive devices to facilitate their plot by harming and hindering the governor’s security detail and any responding law enforcement officers,” according to the Department of Justice.
Prosecutors said the men’s goal was to ignite a civil war.
More than a dozen people were arrested in the kidnapping plot. Fox and Croft were accused of the most serious charges.
(JACKSON, Miss.) — Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba declared a local state of emergency Tuesday after cold weather damaged the Mississippi capital’s water system last week.
Jackson — long plagued with water problems — issued a boil-water advisory on Christmas Day until further notice because of the broken system.
Describing the situation as the “worst case scenario,” Lumumba called on city residents to report leaks to aid in repair efforts and to shut off water taps to preserve water pressure.
“There is no way to prevent what is happening to our water treatment facilities,” Lumumba said during a press conference Tuesday. “We do not control mother nature.”
According to Jackson officials, the city’s water system lost pressure because of unidentifiable breaks in its distribution system, resulting in some parts of Jackson experiencing little to no water pressure.
The city’s main water treatment facility, the O.B. Curtis Water Plant, and the J.H. Fewell Water Treatment Plant are working to increase production to reestablish pressure, officials said in a boil water alert.
“Our crews are all busy today working to restore pressure,” Jackson’s communications director Melissa Payne told ABC News on Monday in an emailed statement.
“We continue to struggle to return pressure to the water system,” officials said in a press release Monday. “We are producing significant amounts of water and pushing that into the system, but the pressure is not increasing — despite those efforts at the plants.”
Lumumba was unclear about whether the water posed a risk to residents, instead describing the boil water notice more as a technicality due to EPA rules, which require a boil water notice when water pressure reaches below a certain level.
“When it drops below that threshold, that does not mean that they’ve been having trouble out of the plant in terms of the treatment of the water,” he said. “It means that when pressure goes below a certain threshold, it is our requirement by the EPA [and] the State Department of Health to issue a city-wide boil water notice.”
The city’s most recent boil-water advisory impacts all surface water connections and excludes customers using its well systems.
Historic flooding in Mississippi in August damaged a major pump at the O.B. Curtis Water Plant, which left around 150,000 of the city’s mostly Black residents without drinkable water.
The water crisis highlighted residents’ years-long plight with the city’s ongoing water issues and raised questions about how Jackson came to be in this situation and what the long-term plans were to fix the issue.
In November, the U.S. Department of Justice reached an agreement and filed a new complaint with Jackson over the city’s alleged mismanagement of its water system.
Through its agreement with the City of Jackson, the DOJ will establish a third-party monitor to ensure that water in the city is safe to drink.
(BALTIMORE) — When John Gelinne Sr. and his son saw a small plane crash-land into an ice-covered creek near their Maryland home on Monday morning, they immediately jumped into action.
The two military men grabbed their kayaks and made their way out to the downed plane, which had landed in Beards Creek in Edgewater, not far from Lee Airport. They used shovels to propel themselves across the iced-over creek, as their paddles were rendered useless by the frozen water.
As the single-engine Piper Cherokee plane sank, the pilot was able to exit and stood on the wing while waiting for help, Maryland State Police said.
When the father and son reached the pilot, he was standing waist-deep in the freezing waters.
Gelinne Sr. said he told the pilot, “‘Get out of the water, just get out of the water and just hold tight.'”
“I just pick-axed backwards and got my kayak back out of the ice and he was out of the water,” Gelinne Sr., a retired naval officer, told Baltimore ABC affiliate WMAR.
Anne Arundel County Police Officer Elizabeth Myersalso also responded via kayak, using a screwdriver to skim across the ice. Body-camera footage shows her reaching the scene of the crash as the 71-year-old pilot, who was the sole occupant of the plane, is hanging on to Gelinne Sr.’s kayak.
A Maryland Department of Natural Resources Police vessel then reached the scene and took the pilot to an awaiting ambulance, police said. He was transported to a local hospital and received treatment for non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said.
The cause of the crash is under investigation, though the preliminary investigation indicates that the plane’s engine began sputtering “moments after the pilot took off from Lee Airport,” state police said.
“Witnesses told police they heard the sputter and shortly thereafter, they heard the plane crash into Beards Creek,” state police said in a statement.
The Gelinnes thought the plane was going to hit their house — until it landed in the creek.
“He recognized he was in trouble and he banked it hard left,” Gelinne Sr. told WMAR.
The father and son suspect the pilot saved lives with this maneuver.
“He probably saved himself and some houses around him, too,” John Gelinne Jr. told WMAR.
The kayakers were not injured in the rescue operation. Gelinne Jr., a U.S. Marine, was left impressed by his father’s actions.
“I’m sore, so I’m sure he’s pretty sore as well,” Gelinne Jr. told WMAR.
First responders hailed the Gelinnes for their quick thinking and likely life-saving actions in getting to the pilot quickly and pulling him partially out of the freezing water. Anne Arundel County Fire Department Lt. Jennifer Macallair called their efforts “heroic.”
Though Gelinne Sr. told WMAR he doesn’t see it that way.
“I look at it just as someone who saw something that needed to do something,” he said.
(MANCHESTER, N.H.) — A mom is facing charges after she allegedly left her newborn in a tent in the freezing-cold New Hampshire woods, according to authorities.
At about 12:30 a.m. Monday, the Manchester Fire Department was dispatched to a reported pregnancy problem, and a woman told responders she gave birth prematurely in the woods, the department said.
Police and fire crews searched the area where the woman directed them but couldn’t find the baby, Manchester police said.
Crews spent about one hour looking for the newborn, but “the search was hampered by inconsistent information,” according to the Manchester Fire Department.
“After nearly an hour, the mother revealed the true location of the baby and led officers to the area,” the police department said.
Searchers found the newborn uncovered on the floor of a tent, the fire department said. The baby had been born that night, according to Manchester police spokesperson Heather Hamel.
The wind chill — what temperature it feels like — plunged to just 6 degrees that night. The baby was taken to a hospital and is “doing well,” Hamel told ABC News on Tuesday.
The mother, Alexandra Eckersley, 26, has been charged with felony reckless conduct, according to police. She was also facing an unrelated warrant for endangering the welfare of a child, police said.
Any baby up to one week old can be anonymously left at a New Hampshire fire station, as long as staff is there, the fire department said. Hospitals, occupied churches and occupied police stations also fall under the state’s Safe Haven law.
(NEW YORK) — The nation’s airports have been mired by holiday travel chaos, as several major airlines have cancelled or severely delayed thousands of flights nationwide due to dangerous weather conditions, staffing issues and system meltdowns.
Many travelers are left wondering what their rights are during extreme flight delays and cancellations.
On Tuesday afternoon, data from Flight Aware showed that nearly 3,000 flights had been canceled within, into or out of the U.S., while more than 3,500 had been delayed, after a rough Monday for flying.
Southwest Airlines alone canceled at least 70% of its flights Monday and 62% on Tuesday and Wednesday.
What are your rights?
Under federal law, consumers are entitled to a refund if the airline cancels a flight, regardless of the reason, and the consumer chooses not to travel.
Consumers are also entitled to a refund if an airline “made a significant schedule change and/or significantly delays a flight and the consumer chooses not to travel,” according to the Department of Transportation (DOT).
The hang-up — DOT has not defined what constitutes a “significant delay.” According to the agency, whether you are entitled to a refund depends on multiple factors, including the length of the delay, the length of the flight and “your particular circumstances.”
In most cases, airlines will first offer you a travel voucher for future travel, Scott Keyes, founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights, told ABC News earlier this year.
“You do not have to click there and accept that travel voucher, because under federal law you’re entitled to a full cash refund,” Keyes said. “You may have to call the airline and demand to get that cash refund rather than the voucher.”
Keyes also said to contact the party you booked your travel with, whether that be the airline itself or a third-party like a travel agency.
“You have to go through whoever you booked your flight with. And so, if you booked it with a third party with an online travel agency, that’s who you’re going to have to chat with,” Keyes said. “The best practice is actually to book directly with the airline if the price is the same. Because when things go wrong, when they’re delays or cancelations, it’s far simpler.”
There are situations, however, where consumers are not entitled to a refund. According to DOT, travelers who purchase nonrefundable tickets, but are unable to travel for a personal reason, such as being sick or late to the airport, are not entitled to a refund.
What if your flight is oversold and you’re denied boarding?
On occasion, airlines may bump passengers from a trip when the flight is oversold. In cases such as this, airlines must first ask passengers to give up their seats voluntarily in exchange for compensation, according to DOT.
There is no limit on the amount of money or vouchers the airline can offer you, and passengers are free to negotiate.
If there aren’t enough volunteers in these situations, airlines can select passengers and involuntarily bump them off the flight. If you’re one of the unlucky few, the airline is required to compensate you in certain situations — including if the passenger had a confirmed reservation, the passenger checked into their flight on time, arrived to the gate on time, and if the airline cannot get you to your destination within one hour of your flight’s original arrival.
What if you decide to change your flight?
Consumers should know most U.S. carriers did away with change fees during the pandemic — meaning if you decide to change your flight, you’ll only have to pay the difference in fare.
ABC News’ Sam Sweeney and Kiara Alfonseca contributed to this report.
(NEW YORK) — A dog that was stranded near a frozen waterfall in Utah on Christmas Eve was saved by search and rescue officials and reunited with her owner.
According to the Weber County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue, a local man was hiking near Waterfall Canyon on Saturday when he became separated from his dog Nala.
The unidentified hiker couldn’t find Nala by nightfall and resumed his search the morning of Christmas Day, the sheriff’s office wrote on its Facebook page.
The hiker’s family members contacted authorities around 1:00 p.m., local time, saying he wasn’t responding to their calls or text messages, officials said.
Nala’s owner answered one of the phone calls once he regained cellphone service and was able to let people know that Nala was around the waterfall, but couldn’t reach her because of the steepness and the icy condition of the terrain, according to Weber County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue.
The search and rescue team responded to the call and were able to save a skittish Nala after a little coaxing, officials said. ]
“Nala was cold with a few minor injuries, but was able to hike down with the rescuers,” officials wrote. “She is one tough puppy! Once reaching the trailhead parking lot, both human and canine couldn’t have been happier to be reunited.”
According to Waterfall Canyon it is a “moderately challenging,” 2.4-mile trail near Ogden, Utah, according to AllTrails. Ogden is around 38 miles north of Salt Lake City.
(NEW YORK) — In a nearly three-minute video statement Tuesday, Southwest CEO Bob Jordan said he is “truly sorry” for the airline’s failures over the holiday weekend, praising the airline’s employees, who he said “are showing up in every way,” as the airline grapples to catch up after canceling thousands of flights.
“I’m apologizing to them daily,” he said.
Airlines canceled thousands of flights in what became a Christmas nightmare for many passengers as winter storms and staffing issues wreaked havoc across the U.S.
Most major airlines canceled or delayed flights, but Southwest Airlines canceled at least 70% of its flights Monday — more than 2,600 — due to a reported system meltdown. The chaos continued Tuesday, with the airline canceling 62% of flights for the day and canceling 62% of flights on Wednesday.
Jordan attributed some of the issues to how Southwest constructs its flight paths.
“We build our flight schedule around communities, not hubs, so we are the largest airline in 23 of the top 25 travel markets in the U.S., cities where large numbers of scheduled flights simultaneously froze as record bitter cold brought challenges for all airlines,” he said.
Southwest is “significantly reduc[ing]” its number of flights over the next few days,” Jordan added, in the hope that things will “be back on track before next week.”
“We’re focused on safely getting all of the pieces back into position to end this rolling struggle,” he said.
Southwest is now doing a “reset” by moving some crews and planes around the country without passengers to get them into place and restart operations. Southwest have stopped selling tickets on flights coming up in the next few days. Passengers are being encouraged to buy flights on other airlines to get to their destinations before the new year.
President Joe Biden tweeted that his administration is “working to ensure airlines are held accountable” amid the changes. Biden urged those who have been affected by cancellations to visit the Department of Transportation website to see if they’re entitled to compensation.
On Christmas Day, 42% of Southwest’s flights were canceled and 48% were delayed, according to data from FlightAware. As of Monday night, data showed that nearly 4,000 flights had been canceled within, into or out of the U.S., while more than 7,700 had been delayed.
Jay McVay with Southwest Airlines said Monday night that “the sheer size of the storm” nationwide affected all major airports.
“It’s just the fact that this one started West swept east and impacted almost every single one of our largest airports that put us in a position where we struggled to recover, and we struggled to get our flight crews and airplanes where they needed to be,” McVay said from Houston’s William P. Hobby Airport.
Capt. Casey Murray, president of the Southwest Airlines Pilots Association, said in a statement earlier Monday that the ordeal has “been catastrophic.”
“It’s been a failure at every level at Southwest. Our pilots, our front-line employees have worked under enormous stress to try to get our passengers from A to B, but we were dealt a really bad hand as far as Southwest is concerned,” Murray said, in part, adding that their “processes,” information technology or infrastructure “just wasn’t there to support the operation.”
“And, unfortunately, our customers are bearing the brunt of it,” Murray added.
Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg told ABC News Live Prime on Tuesday that Southwest must repair its relationship with passengers and crew.
“Cancellation rates across the system for all of the other airlines together are averaging about 5%. With Southwest, it’s more in the neighborhood of 60 or 70%,” Buttigieg said. “It’s a shocking and unacceptable level of disruption combined with passengers being unable to get anybody on the phone to help them, and the airline indicating that they’re actually not able to fully keep track of where their own flight crews are.”
Buttigieg said passengers are entitled to refunds when their flights are canceled and that additional accommodations — like covering the cost of food, ground transportation and hotels — should be provided in this specific scenario.
“As I made clear to the CEO, you shouldn’t have to request it. This should be something that they’re proactively offering,” he added.
Angry Southwest customers took to Twitter on Monday, sharing their frustrations over the delays, cancellations and long hold times to speak to customer service agents.
“With consecutive days of extreme winter weather across our network behind us, continuing challenges are impacting our customers and employees in a significant way that is unacceptable,” Southwest said in a statement posted online. “And our heartfelt apologies for this are just beginning.”
Southwest said it is working to “address the wide-scale disruption” by repositioning its crew and planes, which were all in the wrong spots.
The Department of Transportation issued a statement Monday night, saying it’s “concerned by Southwest’s unacceptable rate of cancellations and delays and reports of lack of prompt customer service. The Department will examine whether cancellations were controllable and if Southwest is complying with its customer service plan.”
ABC News spoke with three stranded travelers — one staying overnight at an airport in Boston until her new flight, one stranded in Chicago after his flight got canceled and one driving with a stranger to make it to his Disney Cruise in Tampa after flight issues.
Each traveler blamed delays on staffing rather than the weather.
ABC News reached out to American Airlines, JetBlue, Delta and United to learn about how staffing is impacting their current delays and cancellations.
“American’s operation, like the entire industry, was heavily impacted by Winter Storm Elliott. After a challenging day on Friday, Dec. 23, the American operation was largely recovered by Saturday evening and we have been operating normally since Christmas Day,” American Airlines said in a statement. “Our quick recovery was only made possible by the American team working diligently at our airports, on our aircraft and in our operations and reservation centers.”
“I wanted to fly home for Christmas,” Laetitia Duler, who was flying home to San Francisco from Boston for the holiday, told ABC News. “As soon as I entered the line, they were just like, ‘your flights canceled. Like, bye.'”
Eric Jernigan was trying to fly from Jackson, Mississippi, to Tampa, Florida, for a Disney cruise when his Delta flight was canceled because of a lack of crew, he told ABC News.
He and five others decided to drive to Florida after getting stuck at Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International Airport.
The city of Buffalo, New York, initiated a travel ban as blizzard conditions moved into the area.
According to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and local officials, 29 people have died in the state following the aftermath of an enormous lake-effect snowstorm.
Buffalo Niagara International Airport announced Monday that it will be closed until Wednesday as its crews work “around the clock” to get the airport back up and running.
ABC News’ Cherise Rudy contributed to this report.
(BUFFALO, N.Y.) — At least 55 people have died nationwide from the wintry weather wreaking havoc across the U.S. over Christmas weekend.
The most deaths are in western New York, where 32 people have died in the wake of a massive lake-effect snowstorm, according to New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and local officials.
Hochul called the storm “the blizzard of the century” in western New York during a news conference Monday and said the White House has promised to quickly approve an emergency disaster declaration. President Joe Biden said he spoke to Hochul on Monday afternoon. He approved a federal emergency declaration in New York Monday evening.
Thirty-one of New York’s deaths are in Erie County, which includes the city of Buffalo, Mark Poloncarz, the executive of Erie County, said Tuesday. One storm-related death was reported in neighboring Niagara County, officials said.
Poloncarz said Tuesday morning that while three new storm-related deaths were confirmed overnight by the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office, the death toll in Erie County rose by only one because the coroner determined the first two people reported dead during the storm in the Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga were not directly related to the blizzard but due to “medical conditions that were not savable.”
Among the storm-related causes of death confirmed by the Erie County Medical Examiner’s Office were three people who suffered heart attacks while shoveling or blowing snow, 14 people who were found outside and three who died due to an EMS delay.
“We do expect that there will be more,” Poloncarz said.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said 18 bodies were recovered in the city of Buffalo; most were found by police inside vehicles.
Among those who perished in the storm in Buffalo was William Clay, who died on his 56th birthday, his sister, Sophia Clay, told ABC News. Sophia Clay said her brother was on his way to a store on Friday when the weather worsened. His body was found frozen on a street, authorities said.
William Clay, according to his sister, was the father of one son, a grandfather of two, and one of seven siblings. She said he read the Bible daily and could quote scripture by heart.
“He’s one of those people that it was in his heart. He spoke it; he lived it. He was a great brother, he was a great grandfather, he was a great friend,” Sophia Clay said.
A driving state of emergency remains in effect in Erie County and Poloncarz said police will start issuing summons to people driving around — “joyriding” — in violation of the driving ban. He said the city of Buffalo remains impassable.
A driving ban remained in effect for the city of Buffalo Tuesday, but Poloncarz said people were not heeding the ban and getting stuck, causing delays for emergency vehicles, snowplows and other large pieces of equipment trying to clear the streets of mountains of snow and abandoned vehicles.
He said 100 National Guard police officers and additional New York State troopers are expected to mobilize in Buffalo Tuesday to prevent unauthorized vehicles from entering the city.
“People just are not obeying the driving ban,” said Poloncarz, justifying the use of military police to enforce the ban.
Buffalo received more than 50 inches of snow over the weekend, according to the National Weather Service.
Reports of looting
Poloncarz also said that police are investigating scattered reports of looting in Buffalo.
“I’m heartbroken about the deaths, just absolutely devastated to see as many deaths. And then to find out that there’s looting going on in our community at the same time we’re still recovering bodies is just horrible,” Poloncarz said.
Daniel Neaverth Jr., the Erie County commissioner of Emergency Services, said more than a dozen gas stations in the county have been reported inoperable “because the convenience side of them has been looted and the equipment inside has been rendered ineffective and thus the pumps for the fueling are ineffective.”
Neaverth said the looting was hampering emergency vehicles from fueling up.
“So if you don’t think there’s a trickle down from going looting and grabbing individual little things, this is a drastic implication for us that we now have to deal with to find alternate fuel sources,” Neaverth said.
Brown said police responded to several looting in the city of Buffalo and have made some arrests. The mayor said it was “reprehensible” that people are taking advantage of a natural disaster, calling the looters “the lowest of the low.”
Poloncarz said 12,473 utility customers countywide remain without power on Monday and he warned some might not have electricity until Tuesday due to the “serious nature of the substation damage.” He said power was restored to about 13,000 customers overnight.
At one point, 23,000 households lost power, said Jackie Bray, the state commissioner of Homeland Security and Emergency Services. Bray said 12,500 households remain without electricity Monday.
Polocarz said that fewer than 5,000 utility customers in Erie County were still without power Tuesday morning.
‘Winter wonderland tour’ bus rescue
Polocarz added that hundreds of cars were left abandoned on roadways across the county, including tractor-trailer rigs and buses.
“There are cars everywhere pointing the wrong direction on roads. They’ve basically been plowed in and need to be dug out and towed,” Poloncarz said.
Among the hundreds who had to be rescued was a group of tourists from around the world on a “winter wonderland bus tour,” Poloncarz said. He said the bus got stuck in the Buffalo suburb of Lackawanna and that rescue crews had to evacuate passengers and take them to a nearby shelter.
“These tourists are getting more than they bargained for with regards to their ‘winter wonderland tour’ as they’ve gone through one of the worst storms in U.S. history,” Poloncarz said.
The “colossal” snowstorm brought winds of nearly 80 mph to Buffalo, the governor said.
“This will go down in history as the most devastating storm” in Buffalo, Hochul said during a Christmas morning news conference.
Poloncarz said Monday that the death toll has now outpaced the Blizzard of 1977.
Buffalo initiated a travel ban as blizzard conditions moved in.
“I cannot overstate how dangerous the conditions still are,” Hochul said Sunday, urging people to stay off the roads on Christmas.
This storm marked the first time in history that the Buffalo Fire Department couldn’t respond to any calls, officials said. National Guardsmen have been called in.
Hundreds of people have been rescued from cars, Hochul said, adding, “We still have people who need to be rescued.”
Buffalo’s airport will be closed until Wednesday. Pittsburgh’s airport is sending plows to help dig out the runways.
The National Hockey League canceled the Tuesday game between the Buffalo Sabres and Columbus Blue Jackets due to the weather and the Sabres not being able to travel from Buffalo in time for the game.
Weather fatalities across the nation
The storm comes as brutally cold air slammed the country on Christmas morning.
The temperature plunged to minus 9 degrees in Minneapolis, 2 degrees in Chicago, 3 degrees in Denver, 15 degrees in New York, 16 degrees in Atlanta and 21 degrees in Dallas.
More than 6.3 million customers across the United States were without power at some point over the holiday weekend, officials said.
More than 165,000 customers woke up without power on Christmas morning across Maine, New York, New Hampshire, Virginia and Florida. The majority of those customers had power restored by Monday, though 15,800 customers in Maine and 13,900 in New York — the vast majority in Erie County — remained without power Monday afternoon.
Airlines continue to cancel thousands of flights in what is becoming a Christmas nightmare for so many. More than 18,200 flights have been canceled since Wednesday, according to FlightAware, a flight tracking website. More than 3,000 flights were canceled into, out of or within the United States on Christmas Eve, and more than 2,000 flights were canceled on Christmas Day.
Another 3,500 flights were canceled in the United States Monday, as of 3:30 p.m. Southwest Airlines is having significant systemwide issues and has canceled 2,600, or about 65%, of scheduled flights.
