Brutal cold grips northeast US

GBNEWS24DESK//

A dangerous combination of record-setting cold temperatures and powerful winds buffeted the northeastern United States on Saturday, creating life-threatening conditions and causing the death of an infant in Massachusetts.

New Hampshire’s Mount Washington overnight recorded a wind chill – a measure of how the combined effect of air and wind feels to the skin – of minus 108 degrees Fahrenheit (-78°Celsius), which appeared to be the lowest ever in the United States. The air temperature at the peak reached minus 47 degrees F (-44 C), with winds gusting near 100 miles per hour (160 kilometers per hour), according to the Mount Washington Observatory.

The high winds brought a tree down onto a car in Southwick, Massachusetts, the Hampden district attorney said in a statement, crushing the vehicle and killing an infant passenger. The driver was transported to a hospital with serious injuries.

In Boston, where officials closed down the public school system on Friday due to the impending freeze, the low temperature hit minus 10 degrees F (-23 C), shattering the day’s record set more than a century ago, the NWS said. In Providence, Rhode Island, the mercury dropped to minus 9 degrees F (-23 C), well below the previous all-time low of minus 2 degrees F (-19 C), set in 1918.

The arctic blast flowing into the United States from eastern Canada brought record lows to Albany, New York; Augusta, Maine; Rochester, and Worcester, Massachusetts, among other places, the NWS said.

The NWS office in Caribou, Maine, said it had gotten reports of “frostquakes” – tremors that feel like earthquakes but are caused by the soil cracking suddenly in the cold – as well as trees splitting open, likely due to sap freezing inside the trunks.