President Joe Biden hosted the bipartisan Conference of American Mayors at the White House on Friday.
Watch Biden’s remarks in the player above.
The meeting came as cities across the country face multiple crises, including two weeks of storms that turned roads into icy death traps, freezing people to death from Oregon to Tennessee and causing power outages which could take weeks to repair.
Storms continued to batter both coasts with another round of weather chaos on Friday.
Rain, snow, wind and freezing temperatures have been blamed for at least 50 deaths in the United States over the past two weeks, as a series of storms swept across the country. Schools and roads were closed and air traffic was blocked
There is hope. The forecast for next week calls for above-average temperatures across most of the country, according to the National Weather Service.
Snow was falling Friday in New York, Baltimore and Washington, DC. But the biggest problems remain in areas hit hard by storms earlier this week.
On the West Coast, Oregon’s governor declared a state of emergency Thursday evening, nearly a week after a crippling ice storm began.
Thousands of residents have been without power since last weekend in parts of Oregon’s Willamette Valley due to freezing rain.
“We lost power on Saturday and were told yesterday it would be more than two weeks before we got it back on,” said Jamie Kenworthy, a real estate broker in Jasper, Lane County.
More than 100,000 customers remained without power Friday morning across the state after back-to-back storms, according to poweroutage.us.
Portland Public Schools canceled classes for the fourth day in a row over concerns about icy roads and water damage to buildings, and Portland State offices were also closed Friday.
Ice was also a problem in the South. Snow and freezing rain added another layer of ice to Tennessee on Thursday. More than 9 inches of snow has fallen around Nashville since Sunday, nearly double the annual average.
Authorities have blamed at least 17 deaths on weather in Tennessee. They included a covered truck driver who slid into a tractor-trailer on a highway, a man who fell through a skylight while cleaning a roof and a woman who died of hypothermia after being found unconscious in her home.
A significant drop in blood donations led Chattanooga, Tenn.-based Blood Assurance to recommend that more than 70 hospitals in five states halt elective surgeries until Wednesday to allow the organization to replenish its inventory. In a news release Thursday, the group cited the weather and several massive blood transfusions over the previous 24 hours in its plea to hospitals in Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and Tennessee .
Cold weather in Washington state was blamed for five deaths. The people — most of them presumed homeless — died from the cold in just four days last week in Seattle, as temperatures fell well below freezing, the medical examiner’s office said.
Two people died from exposure as far south as Louisiana, where temperatures in part of the state remained below freezing for more than two days.
Will Compton of the nonprofit Open Table Nashville, which helps the homeless, stopped his SUV in front of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on Thursday to hand out warm hats, blankets, protein shakes and socks as freezing rain fell.
“Poor and homeless people are being hit the hardest,” Compton said.
Aaron Robison, 62, is staying at one of Nashville’s warming centers and said the cold wouldn’t have bothered him when he was younger. But now, with arthritis in his hip and having to rely on two canes, he needed shelter from the cold.
“Thank God for people who help people on the streets. It’s a blessing,” he said.
Frigid colder air spread across the Midwest from Canada on Friday. Several states were under an advisory as forecasters warned that wind chills plunging to minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 34 degrees Celsius) could be common through Sunday morning.
Since extreme cold set in last week, more than 60 oil spills and other environmental incidents have been reported in North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields. Wind chills dropping as low as -70 degrees F (minus 56.6 C) strained workers and equipment, and regulators said the extreme weather strained workers and made accidents more likely.
The lake-enhanced snow finally left Buffalo, New York, on Thursday evening, after burying parts of the city and some suburbs under five feet of snow in five days. The Buffalo Bills renewed their call for snow shovelers Friday, offering $20 an hour to help dig Highmark Stadium ahead of Sunday’s divisional playoff game against the Kansas City Chiefs.
The West Virginia Legislature bowed out after a brief session Friday because too few lawmakers could travel the snowy highways to the Capitol to vote on the bills.
In Washington, D.C., snow fell gently and the streets around the U.S. Capitol were silent. Schools closed again for the second time in a week and the government was delayed by two hours. President Joe Biden still planned to host mayors from across the country on Friday and was still headed to his Delaware beach house for the weekend.
Associated Press journalists Jonathan Mattise and Kristin M. Hall in Nashville; Adrian Sainz in Memphis; Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York; Colleen Long in Washington, D.C.; and Jeffrey Collins of Columbia, South Carolina, contributed.
