A 22-year-old woman who froze to death while trapped in her car by snow sent a video to her family hours before she died awaiting rescue.
Anndel Taylor was found dead in her car after she became stranded over the weekend on her way home from work in Buffalo, New York state, becoming one of 35 to succumb to the extreme cold in the worst winter storm to hit the US in a generation.
Americans were told to brace for yet more snowfall and for the death toll, which has reached 60, to rise further.
Taylor was trapped in her vehicle for 18 hours as more than 50 inches (127cm) of snow surrounded her vehicle.
In her final messages to family over WhatsApp on Christmas Eve, Taylor said she was “scared” and sent two videos capturing the extreme blizzard blowing around her:
Anndel Taylor, 22, died in her car after being trapped by Buffalo blizzard while driving home from work. She was found after 18 hours. She sent her family this final video from inside the car. pic.twitter.com/w8GBwR9UOm
— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) December 27, 2022
She showed them the windshields of her car completely covered in snow as she rolled down her window.
It is not clear if Taylor died from hypothermia or from carbon monoxide poisoning after snow blocked the exhaust pipe as she attempted to keep herself warm.
Taylor’s family back home in Charlotte, North Carolina, told local media that they did not know the extent of what western New York was experiencing.
Shawnequa Brown, her sister, said: “I don’t know if any of us really knew how serious it was. We didn’t see the news, we didn’t really know what was going on in Buffalo.
“I feel like everybody that tried to get to her got stuck. Fire department, police… everybody got stuck.”
In Buffalo, the dead were found in cars, homes and snowbanks. Some died while shovelling snow, while others perished when emergency crews could not respond to medical crises on time.
Mark Poloncarz, the executive of Erie County in New York, called the blizzard “the worst storm probably in our lifetime”, even for an area known for heavy snow.
Officials warned that the death toll could still increase as they forecasted a further foot of snow to fall.
The National Weather Service predicted that as much as two inches was forecast on Tuesday in Erie County, which includes Buffalo, the second-largest city in New York, with about 275,000 residents.
While that was nothing like the massive storm that dropped more than four feet of snow in some places starting last week, “any additional snowfall that Buffalo may continue to have today is going to be impactful”, according to Bob Oravec, the service’s lead forecaster.
He added: “The biggest impact is going to be how it hinders the removal of the previous snowfall.”
The rest of the US reeled from the so-called “bomb cyclone”, with at least an additional two dozen deaths reported in other parts of the country, as well as power cuts in communities from Maine in the east coast to Washington state in the west.