As the middle of the nation awoke on Thursday, the deep freeze seemed to have settled in for a long, unwanted visit, disrupting life across an entire region for much of a week, contributing to deaths and injuries, and leaving residents impatient to emerge from their homes and get back to normal.
The grim temperatures and gusty winds lingered in the Midwest, and had spread to the Northeast.
Temperatures broke records in some places, and remained low, near record levels, in much of the Midwest on Thursday morning. Minneapolis was minus 23, with a wind chill of minus 38, the National Weather Service said. Chicago was at minus 21, with a wind chill of minus 41. And Milwaukee hit minus 21, with a wind chill of minus 40.
At least eight deaths have been connected to the Midwest’s dangerously cold weather system, according to The Associated Press.
The sustained cold taxed energy systems across the Midwest, leading to some outages 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, when temperatures are expected to rise.
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.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.