CHICAGO — Midwesterners trudged ahead Thursday into a familiar, grim reality: temperatures well below zero, schools and businesses closed, stern warnings to wear extra layers or, better yet, just stay indoors.
The polar vortex that arrived earlier this week has for days disrupted life across an entire region. Deaths and injuries were reported. Decades-old records fell. And, for one more day, even stepping outside remained a painful, risky experience.
But the forecast finally suggested relief ahead. By Thursday night, temperatures across much of the Midwest were expected to poke above zero. By the end of the weekend, meteorologists predicted as much as a 70- or 80-degree swing, with balmy-for-February readings in the 40s or 50s and rain instead of snow.
Still, risks remained. A band of snow complicated travel on Thursday, and in the Northeast, officials warned of their own cold wave, with heavy snow in some places and subzero wind chills in others.
Here are the latest developments:
• At least eight deaths have been connected to the Midwest’s dangerously cold weather system, according to The Associated Press, including that of a University of Iowa student who was found behind an academic hall several hours before dawn on Wednesday. [Read more about those who have died here.]
• A weather observer in Mount Carroll, Ill., recorded a temperature of minus 38 on Thursday morning. If confirmed by state officials, that would become Illinois’s record low, supplanting the previous record of minus 36. [See photos here that show what life is like in the frozen Midwest.]
• The sustained cold taxed energy systems across the Midwest, leading to some power failures and urgent calls to customers to reduce the heat in their homes.
• Many schools, businesses and restaurants remained shuttered on Thursday, though some offices were reopening and many more were expected to reopen Friday.
• By midday on Thursday, airlines had already canceled more than 2,200 flights in the United States, according to FlightAware. On Wednesday, cancellations topped 2,700.
• The East Coast was feeling the bitter cold, too. Temperatures barely broke the double digits in New York City. [Read more here about how the city’s homeless population is coping with the cold.]
An Iowa college student is among the dead
In Iowa City, a student at the University of Iowa was found dead in the early morning hours of Wednesday. Gerald Belz, 18 and a pre-med student, was found lying outside, unresponsive, near a campus building after 2 a.m. local time.
He was one of at least eight people whose deaths were believed to be tied to the streak of extreme cold and icy weather in recent days. Among the others were an elderly Illinois man who fell and was found not far from his home; a man who was hit by a snowplow in the Chicago region; a couple in a vehicle crash along snowy roads in Indiana; and a Milwaukee man who the police say was found in his garage and likely froze to death.
[Read more about Mr. Belz here.]
Hospitals have treated dozens of frostbite patients
Throughout the Midwest, hospitals reported patients arriving with symptoms tied to the weather. The Illinois Department of Public Health said at least 30 people statewide had been to emergency rooms for frostbite or hypothermia-related visits by Wednesday morning.
[You could get frostbite in a matter of minutes. Here’s what to do.]
At Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, the emergency department reported “many patients” who were injured or ill because of the weather. Frostbite cases alone led to at least 13 admissions.
“It’s busier than it would normally be,” Dr. Douglas D. Brunette, an emergency room doctor in Minneapolis, said on Wednesday afternoon. “But it’s not a mass casualty incident yet.”
Temperatures are plunging in the Northeast, too
Officials in New York and other parts of the Northeast warned residents to prepare for temperatures that, while not nearly as cold as the Midwest, could still be dangerous.
In Vermont, Rhode Island and Connecticut, where it was expected to dip into the single digits or lower, officials opened warming centers.
In New York City, where it was 10 degrees at midday, Mayor Bill de Blasio urged people to “bundle up and stay inside as much as possible.” With wind chills expected to fall below zero, city officials warned landlords to provide adequate heat to their tenants.
Conditions were worse in the western part of the state, where Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo declared a state of emergency in several counties and instructed some state workers to stay home. More than 13 inches of snow fell Wednesday in Buffalo, a record for Jan. 30, and more was falling on Thursday.
Records were broken, but there is some warmer weather coming
At least two cities in Illinois and one in Iowa reached record lows overnight, as a dangerously deep freeze kept its hold on the Midwest.
In Rockford, Ill., temperatures dipped to minus 31, breaking a previous record of minus 27 from Jan. 10, 1982. Moline, Ill., on the border with Iowa, also broke a record, reaching minus 33 on Thursday morning, according to the National Weather Service. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, set a record of minus 30.
Chicago did not reach a record low overnight — the previous record was minus 27, from Jan. 20, 1985. But the city was expected to be hit with one to three inches of snow on Thursday, beginning in the late afternoon and stretching into the evening.
[We asked people in Chicago who work in extreme cold for their practical tips for survival. Here’s what they said.]
After several days of brutally cold weather, Chicagoans have something to look forward to, said Matt Friedlein, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
“We’ll be on our way up here soon,” Mr. Friedlein said. “In fact, later in the week, it looks like temperatures in the 40s across much of northern Illinois. No matter what, it will be a significant warm up when you consider how cold we are right now.”
Rescuers come to the aid of hundreds stranded in their cars
Car breakdowns and medical emergencies took on greater urgency across the Midwest as police and fire departments dealt with dangerously low temperatures and increased workloads.
The Illinois State Police assisted more than 1,300 drivers over an eight-hour period on Wednesday, about 10 times troopers’ normal workload. In Michigan, where the extreme cold thwarted efforts to treat frozen roadways, emergency workers closed part of Interstate 675 on Thursday after a series of crashes. And in Indiana, a state trooper helped a dog named Marley and its owner warm up after finding them in a stalled car along a highway.
The cold was especially risky for those surrounded by water. The Coast Guard used air boats to rescue seven people stranded in an ice shanty off the coast of Sturgeon Bay, Wis. And on Mackinac Island, Mich., where the dangerous weather made plane travel impossible, another Coast Guard ship sliced through the ice to rescue a woman needing medical attention.
“The crew responded admirably in adverse conditions to answer the call,” said Lt. Steele Johnson, the commanding officer of the ship that rescued the woman, in a statement. “We’re happy to have done our part in getting her the advanced medical treatment she needed.”
Calls to reduce the heat despite the frigid cold
In Minnesota, Xcel Energy asked customers to conserve power and reduce their thermostats to 63 degrees or 60 degrees, depending on their location. Xcel also paid for hotel rooms for customers who lost their gas supply in Princeton, Minn., where the temperature on Thursday morning was minus 35.
“Your cooperation is critical to try to prevent widespread natural gas outages,” the company posted on its website.
In Michigan, a fire Wednesday night at a Consumers Energy facility led to fears of a natural gas shortage. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer went on television late at night urging residents of the state’s Lower Peninsula to reduce their thermostats to 65 degrees or less.
“You can play a role in helping people across the state survive these extreme temperatures,” Ms. Whitmer said in a statement.
Consumers Energy also asked several manufacturers to halt production because of the natural gas shortage. Erin Davis, a General Motors spokeswoman, said work was stopped on Wednesday night at 11 plants in Michigan. Many workers had been told not to report for their shifts on Thursday.
[With schools closed, one family tried five polar-weather experiments. Here’s what happened.]
The extreme cold and the connection to climate change
The extremely low temperatures this week in parts of the United States stand in sharp contrast to the trend toward warmer winters. But they may also be a result of warming.
Emerging research suggests that a warming Arctic is causing changes in the jet stream and pushing polar air down to latitudes that are unaccustomed to them and often unprepared. Hence this week’s atypical chill over large swaths of the Northeast and Midwest.
Friederike Otto, an Oxford University climate scientist who studies how specific weather events are exacerbated by global warming, said that while not all of these extreme events could be attributed to climate change, the profound changes in the earth’s atmosphere raised “the likelihood of a large number of extreme events.”