More than 84000 homes in the dark in the U.S. due to winter storm

Washington, Jan 1 (Prensa Latina) More than 84 thousand homes in five states remain without electricity service due to the onslaught of the strong winter storm that hit most of the country over the weekend.

According to data updated Monday morning by the Poweroutage monitor, 84,242 customers in California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and Oregon are still in the dark.

The day before, outages affected more than 200,000 families in California and Nevada, where bad weather caused flooding in cities and counties.

The powerful weather phenomenon threatens destructive winds and tornadoes by midday Monday from Houston, Texas, to Shreveport, Louisiana.

Thunderstorms will develop before a cold front moves through southeast Texas overnight into Tuesday morning, the National Weather Service forecast.

At least 16 states are under winter and/or wind alerts, and a winter storm is expected to bring near-blizzard conditions to the upper Midwest in the next few hours.

It has been decades since Americans have been this cold or witnessed a powerful winter storm with a bomb cyclone category (cyclonic bomb or explosive cyclogenesis) that began hitting the U.S. since Christmas holidays and killed about 65 persons.