Massive storm hits the Southeast, leaving hundreds of thousands without power

Dec. 9, 2018 / 5:21 PM GMT

By Kalhan Rosenblatt

More than a thousand flights were canceled and hundreds of thousands of households and businesses lost power after a winter storm brought freezing rain and up to about 18 inches of snow to parts of the Southeast.

The winter storm, which moved east after blanketing parts of Texas in as much as 10.5 inches of snow, covered the area near Saluda, North Carolina, in more 18.5 inches of snow on Sunday, according to Weather.com.

Asheville Regional Airport in North Carolina reported Sunday that it had received nearly 10 inches of snow.

Parts of northern Georgia got 7.5 inches of snow, while in northeast Tennessee, and southwest Virginia the accumulation was up to 10 inches deep, according to Weather.com.

In South Carolina, the National Weather Service’s Columbia office said it had received as much as 2 inches of rain.

Nearly 1,800 flights were canceled, according to flight tracking website Flight Aware, most of them either heading to or out of North Carolina, South Carolina or Virginia.

Another 7,600 flights around the country were delayed, Flight Aware reported.

Throughout the South, more than 350,000 people in the storm’s path were without power, according to PowerOutage.us, a site that tracks power outages in the United States.

More than half of those power outages were in North Carolina and nearly 92,000 were in South Carolina as of 12 p.m. ET on Sunday.

The storm is forecast to have mostly dissipated by Monday, but some areas in the southern Appalachian region could still be at risk for pockets of snowfall, Weather.com reported.