“The longer you’re exposed to the cold, the worse it is,” said Dr. Hans House, a professor of emergency medicine at the University of Iowa. “The body can handle cold temperatures briefly very well, but the prolonged exposure is a problem."
The National Weather Service said arctic air moving into the Southeast will cause already frigid temperatures to plummet into the teens on Friday night in cities like Nashville, where more than 79,000 homes and businesses still lacked power nearly a week after a massive storm dumped snow and ice across the eastern U.S.
More than 230,000 homes and businesses were without electricity Thursday night, according to the outage tracking website poweroutage.us. The vast majority were in Mississippi and Tennessee, with roughly 87,000 each.
Forecasters say the subfreezing weather will persist in the eastern U.S. into February and there's high chance of heavy snow in the Carolinas, Virginia and northeast Georgia this weekend, possibly up to a foot in parts of North Carolina. Snow is also possible along the East Coast from Maryland to Maine.
