A huge winter storm is bringing large quantities of snow to the northeast of the United States, having earlier wreaked havoc across the south of the country.
Furman Smith breaks out his cross-country skis in Atlanta, Georgia, on Wednesday. Photo: AFP / Getty Images North America
Across the typically mild South, more than 500,000 homes and businesses lack power, and more than 3300 US flights have been cancelled.
The mammoth storm has affected people in 22 states from Texas to Maine and caused at least 10 deaths, including three people killed when an ambulance slid off an icy Texas road and caught fire and a man in Georgia who slipped and fell on a patch of ice, the BBC reports.
The most crowded swath of the US - between Washington DC and Boston - is bracing for up to 20cm of snow.
The storm, described by the National Weather Service as an event of "historical proportions", leaves in its southern wake a wreckage of snapped tree limbs and power lines coated in as much as 2.5cm of ice, motorways turned to car parks, road accidents, and residents shivering in darkened homes.
Forecasters said it was one of the worst storms to strike Atlanta, the largest city in the South, since 1973.
President Barack Obama offered the might of the US federal government in aid, declaring a disaster in the state of South Carolina and all northern counties in Georgia.
