Americans stripped supermarket shelves ahead of potentially “catastrophic” winter weather that threatened at least 160 million people across the country.<\/p>\n
From Texas to Washington DC, shoppers have encountered bare shelves as people prepare for a massive winter storm expected to impact large portions of the US this weekend.<\/p>\n
Ice, snow and sleet could begin falling later Friday in Texas and Oklahoma. The storm was expected to slide into the South with freezing rain and sleet. <\/p>\n
Then it will move into the Northeast, dumping about 30 centimeters of snow from Washington, DC, through New York and Boston, the National Weather Service predicted.<\/p>\n
More than 2,700 weekend flights have already been cancelled including many in and outbound from Texas.<\/p>\n
State officials there vow the grid is in better shape than it was five years ago, when it failed during a deadly winter storm and left millions without power.<\/p>\n
Republican Governor Greg Abbott told journalists the grid “has never been stronger, never been more prepared and is fully capable of handling this winter storm.”<\/p>\n
Yet Michael Webber, a University of Texas engineering professor, warned ice accumulations would remain “a big risk” across the country — ice could amass and weigh down trees, for example, downing power lines and provoking outages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Americans stripped supermarket shelves ahead of potentially “catastrophic” winter weather that threatened at least 160 million people across…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427200,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[203123,203119,203131,203127,23,3,203128,203124,203132,203120,203130,203126,203134,203122,21,19,22,20,203129,203125,203133,203121,25,24],"class_list":{"0":"post-427199","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-id10155","9":"tag-id12798","10":"tag-id13363","11":"tag-id13848","12":"tag-america","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-slugsnow","15":"tag-slugstorm","16":"tag-slugunited-states","17":"tag-slugwinter","18":"tag-titlesnow","19":"tag-titlestorm","20":"tag-titleunited-states","21":"tag-titlewinter","22":"tag-united-states","23":"tag-united-states-of-america","24":"tag-unitedstates","25":"tag-unitedstatesofamerica","26":"tag-urlsafevaluesnow","27":"tag-urlsafevaluestorm","28":"tag-urlsafevalueunited-states","29":"tag-urlsafevaluewinter","30":"tag-us","31":"tag-usa"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=427199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/427199\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/427200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=427199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=427199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=427199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}