Over 100,000 homes, businesses in California suffering power outages due to winter storm

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 24 (Xinhua) -- More than 100,000 homes and businesses across California were left in the dark early Friday as a heavy winter storm continued lashing the most populous state in the United States.

According to PowerOutage.US, a website that tracks, records and aggregates power outages across the country and updates its data every 10 minutes, about 116,000 California customers were without electricity as of 10:00 a.m. local time Friday.

The storm, which first rolled into the state on Thursday with rain, hail and snow, continued to bring unusually heavy snow as well as cold, strong winds, and it will last into weekend, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.

The NWS released a blizzard warning for the Ventura County and Los Angeles County mountains from Friday to Saturday, the first blizzard warning for the Southern California mountains since from 1989.

The Sierra Avalanche Center also issued an avalanche warning for parts of the Sierra Nevada mountains from Friday morning until Saturday morning.

In total, about 3 million Californians received a winter storm warning on Friday.

According to social media posts from local agencies, besides of power outages, the weather resulted in multiple road and highway closures after snow and ice accumulated on the surfaces.

Meanwhile, over 720,000 customers in Michigan lost their electricity on Friday morning and authorities predicted that those customers would have power back sometime Sunday.