US emergency crews in northern Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas worked non-stop yesterday, after an unusually severe ice storm moving eastwards across the region cut road links and disrupted power supplies.
An ice storm is one in which rain falls through extremely cold air, freezing on contact with the ground.
Weather-related road accidents, and the cold, have been blamed for 18 deaths since the storm began on Monday. These included four in New Mexico, one in Missouri and nine in Texas, according to US media reports. Four people were killed in Arkansas in automobile accidents attributed to the storm.
Hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in northern Texas, Oklahoma and Arkansas were left without power, due to ice on transmission lines or ice-laden trees crashing down onto cables, the authorities said.
Early yesterday about 187,000 customers in Arkansas were still without electricity, and many people were also without telephone service or water, according to the Weather Channel. In Oklahoma the figure for those without power was 170,000.
In northern Texas, the cold eased somewhat early yesterday, as the storm had moved eastwards across Louisiana and Mississippi, falling mainly as rain, local media reported.
Firefighters and the National Guard had worked through the night to rescue about 1,000 motorists, many of them drivers of west-bound heavy goods vehicles, trapped along a stretch of the interstate highway 250 km west of Dallas according to reports.
Truck drivers along the route - a major artery for California bound goods traffic - were ill-prepared for the heavy snow and icy conditions there on Wednesday.
In Arkansas late on Wednesday, National Guard troops delivered water, electricity generators, and food supplies to rural residents.
Gillian Sandford reports from Belgrade:
An electricity crisis across Serbia brought power blackouts across the country yesterday disrupting schools, factories and hospitals and leaving the new rulers with no quick fix for a problem that threatens to erode their people's patience and support.
The political fallout from the crisis has dampened the euphoria following the landslide triumph of the Democratic Opposition of Serbia (DOS) reformists in the Serbian elections on December 23rd.
"DOS is promising too much and they made a mistake because they didn't inform people about this situation," said pregnant Ms Vanja Lipovac (38), an interpreter in the capital.
A regime of power cuts affecting three out of every four sectors of consumers at any one time has left homes in cold darkness for between eight and 18 hours over recent days and shut down many non-vital institutions.
The Serbian Energy Minister, Mr Srboljub Antic, has promised no cuts on the New Year holiday, but he admitted that - with that exception - the punishing schedule of long cuts will continue until January 3rd.
A spokeswoman for the UN office for Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (Ochra) said that immediate crisis might ease by mid-January, but shortages and power cuts would affect the country until March. And the fundamental problems would not be solved for three to four years.
The crisis poses a major political challenge to the authorities. For with the coalition partners themselves predicting new Serbian elections in six to eight months, the energy shortage threatens to hamper their reformist programme aimed at relaunching Serbia as a modern, democratic state.
In central Serbia, towns such as Kraljevo, Cacak and Kragujevac are particularly badly affected because they have no facility to store crude oil for heating fuel. A state of emergency is in force in Cacak.