More than 20 deaths from the onset of winter in the USA and Mexico

According to media reports, more than 20 people were killed by the onset of winter in the USA and neighboring Mexico. In southern Texas, hit hardest by the cold snap, a woman and girl who tried to warm up using a car were suffocated, according to NBC News. In the city of Houston, two homeless people froze to death, as the sheriff’s office in Harris County announced.

In Louisiana, a man died of a head injury after falling on slippery ice. A ten-year-old boy died on Sunday in Tennessee after he and his six-year-old sister broke into a frozen pond. Several people died in weather-related traffic accidents in Texas, Kentucky and Missouri.

The extreme winter weather triggered at least four tornadoes, according to the Weather.com website, including one in North Carolina that killed at least three people and injured ten others.

According to the authorities, six people died in northern Mexico, five of them from hypothermia and one suffocated from a defective heating system, the local authorities said. The cold had frozen gas lines, which resulted in power outages.

In the United States, more than 3.5 million homes and businesses were without electricity on Tuesday evening. In order to avoid overloading the grids, the electricity suppliers in Texas have switched off individual plants since the weekend.

In Chicago in the north of the USA, meanwhile, the snow was piling up. The residents there struggled to free their cars from the masses of snow.

–