EFE/ Kamil Krzaczynski

Chicago (USA) / Police in the city of Westchester, Illinois, have called on city criminals to stay home because it is “too cold to commit crimes.” Six people have already lost their lives due to the extreme cold of the Midwest of the United States, with temperatures typical of the North Pole and in cities such as Duluth, in Minnesota, or Chicago in Illinois, thermal sensations of 50 and 46 degrees below zero, respectively.

The cold wave, that arrived today and it will continue during the next few hours, has paralyzed the main cities of the region, which register minimum temperatures of 29 below zero, such as Chicago, where 2.7 million people live.

Historical record of low temperatures in the USA

But these low temperatures are aggravated by the wind, which further reduces the thermal sensation, to 46 degrees below zero, in the third most populous city in the United States.

J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, where Chicago is, declared a disaster zone on Tuesday in anticipation of the “serious threat to health” posed by these “potentially historic temperatures.”

In some areas of the state, temperatures lower than Alaska have been recorded, and thermal sensations of 46 degrees below zero were experienced at O’Hare International Airport.

Flights and trains cancelled by the cold

In this airport 1,325 flights had to be cancelled, while in the neighbour of Midway the figure was 326, according to the Aviation Department of Chicago, a city that is expected to be the epicentre of this cold wave, which can cause almost freezing snapshot.

The postal service and the circulation by several sections of railway lines also had to be suspended today in the region due to the intense cold.

In the same state of Illinois, Westchester City police jokingly called on city criminals to stay home because it was “too cold to commit crimes.”

Death by frostbite

A 70-year-old man appeared frozen in Detroit today, local police said, declined to confirm whether the cold felt in Michigan City, with a thermal sensation that was around 30 degrees below zero, was the cause of death.

His death is in addition to that of a man who died on the weekend in Minnesota for not being able to enter his home because he lost the keys, to three others in traffic accidents caused by weather conditions and an individual’s Milwaukee that fell down when he was shovelling snow. (January 31, 2019, EFE/ Practica Español)

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