Arctic blast puts northern United States into deep freeze

NEW YORK (NYTIMES, REUTERS) - Shivering, snowbound cities in the US are scrapping their outdoor New Year's Eve countdowns.

Polar-bear plunges are being canceled because of fears of frostbite and hypothermia.

The cold appeared to be at least partially the culprit in the deaths of three thresher sharks found washed up on the shores of Wellfleet and Orleans on Cape Cod over the past several days, according to scientists.

Record-breaking snowfalls have stranded older and disabled residents inside their homes for days.

Cars are buried under mountains of snow, and lethally low temperatures are forcing cities across the Northeast and Midwest to open emergency "warming centres" for homeless residents and people whose furnaces are no match for the cold.

Forecasters warned the frigid temperatures could last through the New Year holiday as an arctic blast sent most of the US North-east and Midwest into a deep freeze that set record lows in several spots on Thursday (Dec 28). The weather is set to test the mettle of hundreds of thousands in New York's Times Square as they ring in the New Year on Sunday night.

In Times Square, thousands were bundled up for a chill that hit the city.

"It's really cold but I love it. My fingers feel like they're going to break but it's OK," said Ms Tashena Eason, 28, a registered nurse from Miami, Florida.

For a time, the hashtag #ItSoCold was the top trending US topic on Twitter on Thursday.

A cold front bearing down on the Pacific North-west was expected to dump as much as 1 metre of snow from Friday morning in parts of Washington state and the northern Rocky Mountains, the National Weather Service said.

Forecasters said the temperature is likely to dip under minus 12 deg C, well below the typical average low for the day.

Law-enforcement officials said the weather was a factor in several deaths across the country, including two cold-related deaths in the Chicago area and a rollover car crash that killed four people in Kansas.

In city after city, the heaps of snow and relentless cold bedeviled government services.

The deep freeze made it harder to melt icy streets with rock salt, public-works officials said.

In western New York and Pennsylvania, snowplow drivers trying to clear the streets faced an obstacle course of immobilized cars. Waterways turned just as treacherous as roadways. In northern Michigan, two freighters got stranded in the icy St. Marys River and had to be freed by U.S. and Canadian coast guard ships.

Meanwhile, Tioga, North Dakota, about 320km north of Bismarck, was one of the coldest spots in the continental United States on Thursday at minus 26 deg C early on Thursday afternoon.

For most of the region encompassing New England, northern Pennsylvania and New York, the National Weather Service issued wind chill advisories or warnings as temperatures were expected to be below minus 12.2 deg C in a wide area.

For upstate New York, east of Lake Ontario, the NWS warned of "dangerously" cold wind chills of minus 26.1 deg C to minus 34.4 deg C through Friday.

Erie, a city of about 100,000 on the shores of Lake Erie in north-west Pennsylvania, was expecting a fresh round of winter storms that could bring as much as an additional 25 cm of "lake effect" snow, forecasters said. The area is already buried under more than 165.1cm from a record-breaking storm earlier this week.

At Erie's UPMC Hamot hospital - the only trauma centre in the area - employees used their own four-wheel-drive vehicles to ferry snowbound workers to the hospital to ensure it could continue to operate.

Some employees stayed overnight to avoid getting stranded, Mr Jim Donnelly, the hospital's chief nursing officer, said on Thursday.