CARL AZUZ, cnn 10 ANCHOR: Along with the temperature, records have fallen across the United States thanks to a winter storms that's scraping across the country. I'm Carl Azuz. Thank you for taking 10 for cnn.
Of the 48 states in the contiguous U.S., the government reported that snow was on the ground in 45 of them. That happened on Tuesday morning. Only Florida, Georgia and South Carolina were snow free at that time. The snow covered more than 73 percent of the country outside of Alaska and Hawaii.
That's the most coverage the nation has seen since records of this started being kept in 2003. It's fun for folks to play in, it's not fun if they have nowhere warm to go afterward.
That's a big enough problem to cause states of emergency in places like West Virginia, Kentucky and Texas. More than 10 inches of snowfall has piled up in the central part of the Lonestar State. Below freezing temperatures were recorded in every part of the state. That's put a record amount of demand on the state's electrical grid and then the power went out.
Several million Texans couldn't turn on the heat yesterday. Some retreated to shelters or ran their cars outside on streets and driveways to get warm.
Energy officials say limited natural gas supplies are part of the problem. So are frozen wind turbines. They generate an estimated 25 percent of the state's power but the ice storm caused some of them to shutdown or freeze up.
