Virginia State Police recover vehicles during dangerous driving conditions in snowy weather on January 6. Phots: MGN Online

The latest winter storms slamming the Mid-Atlantic, East Coast and parts of the South had local and state officials and residents in various parts of the country once again scrambling amid ongoing destructive weather patterns and natural disasters. Cancelled airline flights, traffic pileups and accidents, school cancellations and power outages followed these latest rounds of early January 2022 storms also forcing various states to issue emergency declarations.

Last year the U.S. endured multiple severe weather events, several weather records, including rainfall amounts, snow accumulation and high and low temperatures were broken, and this year has weather experts, global warming activists climatologists asking, is more on the horizon?

This unprecedented weather ravaging America comes in the wake of the direct warnings from the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan. For over 40 years absent his teacher the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad, the Minister has been putting the American government on notice that Allah (God) will use the forces of nature as a weapon of mass destruction against America for her abuse and mistreatment of Black and Indigenous people and continued evil and wrongdoing.

Virginia State Police recovering vehicles during dangerous driving conditions in snowy weather on January 6. Photos: MGN Online

“The plagues of God’s Judgment are on America. The White man is worried about terrorists, but no one terrorizes like God,” Min. Farrakhan warned in a Twitter post in 2017.

Advertisement

A large snowstorm brought significant accumulation to Nashville, Tennessee, on Jan. 6 marking the snowiest day in years and causing treacherous traveling conditions in that state and Kentucky reported AccuWeather.  The quick accumulation made it harder for crews to keep up with clearing the roads and a tractor-trailer jackknifed on Interstate 40, causing the westbound lanes to be closed in the area.

The wreck occurred just outside Jackson, Tennessee, and was the first of many crashes throughout the day. In Kentucky, up to 100 vehicles were involved in a pile up on Interstate 64 near Mount Sterling, according to accuweather.com. Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear deployed the National Guard to help state police with accidents on the roads and he declared a state of emergency following the storm’s dangerous impacts on the state. Snowfall in Lexington also set a new daily record.

Bringing in the new year, on January 3, the biggest snowstorm for the mid-Atlantic since 2019 dumped more than a foot of snow in portions of Maryland, Delaware, and southern New Jersey, leaving motorists stranded on a 50 mile stretch of Interstate 95 in the Virginia area for more than 24 hours, and halting an Amtrak passenger train for more than 30 hours.

Motorists became stuck partly due to multiple disabled trucks blocking the way in snowy and icy conditions, transportation officials stated.

While temperatures dropped into the teens during the night, drivers turned their engines on for a time to heat up and turned them off to conserve fuel. Other drivers shared food and other supplies with one another.

“Heavy snow was falling but salt trucks and plows could not get onto the highway to clear the snow. The region got heavy snow much faster than anticipated,” Marcie Parker, a Virginia Department of Transportation engineer (VDOT), told News 4, an NBC Washington, D.C., affiliate.

“We knew snow was going to be coming down around an inch to an inch and a half an hour, which is excessive, but it came down even faster at times, and we got more snow than anticipated,” she added.

The storm left more than 400,000 customers without power in the mid-Atlantic and Southeast areas. In New Jersey, where Governor Phil Murphy declared a state of emergency in five southern counties, he called the storm the most significant snow event in four years.

Accumulating snow fell across portions of northern Alabama, north Georgia, much of Tennessee, and as far south as the Florida Panhandle. Snowfall impacted northeast Wisconsin, on Jan. 5 including winds that topped 30 miles per hour. 

Christina Muhammad is coordinator for the 10,000 Fearless First Responders in Austin, Texas. “I coordinate when there’s a disaster that takes place, gather logistics. I determine how many people we’re going to need, what type of equipment is needed, what supplies are needed,” she said. The group has assisted on several weather and disaster-related situations around the country.

“We have to get serious about our survival and stop thinking that someone is coming to save you. Everyone is going to be busy saving themselves and their families,” she told The Final Call.

“The intensity of the storms is going to get worse. We constantly have to prepare on a bigger scale. There’s so much going on, the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has already told us this was going to happen. We have to get out and teach our people as far as what to store in our homes and cars. All of this that we see is the beginning of our sorrows, as the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan said.”

In the book, “The Fall of America,” the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad stated, “The four (4) Great Judgments that Allah (God) promises to destroy America, with are now coming upon her…hail, snow, drought, earthquake. Allah (God) has reserved His treasures of snow and ice to be used against the wicked country America in the day of battle and war. These are some of Allah’s (God’s) weapons, the storms that we see going on.”

Ending the year 2021, on December 30 residents of Boulder County in Colorado, barely made it out of their homes and out of harm’s way due to a raging wildfire, known as the Marshall Fire. Over 45,000 people in the towns of Superior and Louisville were given instructions to evacuate immediately.

Months of drought and winds at 110 mph, created the most devastating fire in Colorado’s history. Within a six hour time span, tens of thousands of people were displaced. There was a total of 991 structures destroyed and 127 structures damaged by the fire and 6,026 acres of land burned. An active investigation is going on to figure out the cause of the fire.

Chihoko Cullens told the Colorado Sun newspaper she did not receive any warning, except the smell of fire and thick smoke that billowed up to her house on Cherokee Avenue in the Sagamore neighborhood on the edge of Superior. In a matter of seconds, Ms. Chihoko got her three children in her old Dodge minivan and ran back inside to grab her phone. By the time she got back in the vehicle, she could no longer see her house through smoke so thick it made her choke, reported coloradosun.com.

Yaleclimateconnections.org shared the story of Jonathan Vigh, a project scientist who lost his home in Superior. “The speed at which it progressed was so frightening,” the website reported.  Mr. Vigh urged everyone to develop and practice a safety plan for whatever hazards frequent their area. “If you have a plan, drill it. We didn’t talk about our plan often enough,” he said.

One of the most painful property losses for Mr. Vigh was a hard drive, containing years of work, that he’d been keeping in his basement during the pandemic while scrimping on internet cloud storage. “If I’d had a checklist on a clipboard, I wouldn’t had lost my entire digital life, I would have grabbed that hard drive. I wasn’t thinking on all cylinders because of the time urgency of this emergency.”

The Community Foundation of Boulder County said it has approved a grant to begin immediately dispersing $5 million in direct aid to those impacted by the Marshall Fire.

Meanwhile winter storm watches are being considered by the National Weather Service for additional parts of the country as it is experiencing or bracing for more inclement weather.

The severe weather appeared to be responsible for the deaths of two children. In rain-soaked Decatur, Georgia, a tree fell on a home and killed a five year old boy. In Townsend, Tennessee, a snow-covered tree fell on a home and killed a child who had been in their bedroom.

At Final Call presstime, wind chill alerts were in effect for over half a dozen states across the northern Plains as subzero temperatures were forecast, with wind chills possibly dropping to 45 degrees below zero.

“The dangerously cold wind chills could cause frostbite on exposed skin in as little as 10 minutes,” the National Weather Service said, referring to areas of Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas.

At presstime the Pacific Northwest is slowly recovering from a series of storms that engulfed the region with rain and snow. Southwest Washington has experienced its worst flooding in a decade and some rivers crested at more than 18 feet in early January, the National Weather Service said. Washington Gov. Jay Inslee issued an emergency proclamation Jan. 7.

Not including the devastating and deadly tornadoes that struck Kentucky and other states in December 2021. There were 18 weather disasters that cost the U.S. at least $1 billion. As the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad forewarned, “the worse is yet to come.”

In the fourth installment of his historic online lecture series, “The Time and What Must Be Done,” Min. Farrakhan cautioned, “You don’t like what I am saying, and you wish I would stop.   And some of you will try to stop me! That is entirely up to you. … But remember! When you plan against me, the plan is already against you. And to prove it: He’s (God’s) going to increase the calamities shortly after you hear this message.” Final Call staff and Associated Press contributed to this report. Shawntell Muhammad can be contacted at

[email protected]