Nearly 170 million Americans are under winter weather advisories

The severe winter weather has sparked emergency declarations in at least seven states, including Alabama, Oregon, Oklahoma, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi and Texas.

Air traffic was halted, at least temporarily, at five airports: George Bush Intercontinental and William P. Hobby in Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth International, Austin-Bergstrom International and Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers International in Mississippi.

Texas has borne the brunt of the cold weather. Officials in Harris County, the state’s most populous county that includes Houston, warned its 4 million residents to stay indoors because the cold weather will be around for a while.

People ski down North Interstate Avenue in Portland, Oregon, on Saturday, February 13.

Icy conditions on roadways

A 10-car pileup on Interstate 45, south of downtown, was just one of many incidents on icy roads. Acevedo urged people to avoid traveling.

A person walks through the snow on the Angelo State University campus in Texas on Sunday.

Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, who declared a state of emergency earlier in the day, echoed the chief’s orders.

“Please stay off the roads tonight and through tomorrow. This is serious! The roads are dangerous!”

On top of the danger icy roads pose, the mayor also cautioned residents that the weather could cause rolling blackouts.

Zoe Schmidt of Cypress said her car spun around, ran off the roadway, flipped several times and landed in the middle of a feeder road. Jason Muniz said he called 911, then held Schmidt’s hand as two other men used a saw to cut her out of the car.

“The last thing I remember, coherently, is them pulling me through a broken glass window,” she said.

The men wrapped her in blankets and kept her warm until an ambulance arrived. After spending the night in the hospital, she was released the next day with a dislocated shoulder and a black eye, KTRK reported. Schmidt said she contacted Muniz via social media to say thank you and hopes to “pay it forward one day.”

Shelters opened and power outages widespread in Texas

Houston rushed to open warming facilities for its homeless population.

City Councilwoman Letitia Plummer told CNN a line formed early for a place inside the George R. Brown Convention Center.

“We are leading in evictions around the country and because of that, our homeless numbers are increasing. These are people at the convention center that wouldn’t normally be there,” Plummer said, adding people have been “self-evicting.”

Plummer said the city has opened six additional warming facilities, each housing 50-60 homeless, and that none of them are full at the moment. The city is working to open more warming facilities to ensure no one in need is turned away, she said.

“This is typically done through rotating outages, which are controlled, temporary interruptions of electric service. This type of demand reduction is only used as a last resort to preserve the reliability of the electric system as a whole,” ERCOT said in a statement.

The council had previously asked consumers and businesses to reduce their electricity use as much as possible through Tuesday.

Houston and the surrounding areas are under their first-ever wind chill warning. Every county in Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas is currently under a winter storm warning.

Cold snap from coast to coast

Below freezing temperatures are forecast to affect more than 245 million people in the lower 48 states over the next seven days, with more than 50 million Americans expected to experience temperatures below zero.

The cold air is so widespread that you could travel nearly 2,000 miles from the Rio Grande on the Mexican border to the St. Lawrence River on the Canadian border entirely in winter storm warnings or watches.

There is the potential for more than 240 cold temperature records to be broken by Tuesday evening, and some records have already been shattered.

The heaviest snow in the East is expected to fall from the Mississippi Valley, through the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes. A total of 6-12 inches is expected by Tuesday evening from Arkansas to Upstate New York.

“What we’re facing is three winter storms in seven days,” said Kentucky Transportation Secretary Jim Gray during a Monday morning news conference.

Kentucky is currently experiencing its second storm of three. More snow is expected later Monday.

“We had what amounted to an intermission, actually, between the winter storms this weekend,” Gray said. “That enabled our highway crews to get a bit of rest and make some headway in clearing fallen limbs and trees, for example, and restocking our salt supplies.”

Oklahoma City has gone a record five days without climbing over 20 degrees Fahrenheit — they are not expected to top that temperature until Thursday, for a stretch of nine days.

“This cold snap is forecast to result in record low temperatures that are comparable to the historical cold snaps of Feb 1899 & 1905,” according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Along with the unusual, widespread cold are snow events that could also break records.

Seattle has already reported more than 11 inches of snow over the weekend, the most since January 1972, almost 50 years ago. More than 50 inches of snow has fallen in parts of Wyoming over the last few days.

But not every place was cold. Miami hit a record high heat index of 91 on Sunday.

Correction: An earlier version of this story had the wrong day for the pile-up in Fort Worth and the incorrect number of deaths. The Thursday pile-up left nine people dead.