Gotta get the bread and milk!
Grocery stores are quickly running out of supplies as frantic customers stock up ahead of the Arctic blast and subsequent snowstorm expected to barrel across the country.
Forecasters warned that the weather system, dubbed Winter Storm Fern, will send many cities’ temperatures plummeting well below zero — and could dump anywhere from one to two feet of snow in some parts of the eastern US.
Megan Monroe-Evans, an Alabama resident, shared a startling video on TikTok showing her local grocery store’s barren refrigerators.
“The weather man mentioned a possibility of ice and snow and this is what we here in the south do… buy all the milk, bread and eggs. Like WTF,” she wrote in the caption.
She hoped that the “panic buying” was “just a south thing” — which, so far, seems to be ringing true.
Similar videos were posted by fretful customers at stores in Texas, Oklahoma, and Virginia, but very few from states in the Northeast that could be buried under up to a foot of snow over the weekend.
Kym Adams, a mother in Oklahoma, posted a TikTok video of her shopping haul ahead of the storm. She fared much better than her Alabama counterpart, though there were still empty rows where toilet paper, bottled water, bread and milk would usually be, according to the video.
Meteorologists warned subzero temperatures could cause trees to explode in the Midwest and Northern Plains.
Extreme cold spells that come on suddenly without giving trees “time to acclimate” can cause the “life-sustaining sap inside” to swell, according to the National Forest Foundation.
“Sap contains water so it expands when frozen, putting pressure on the bark, which can break and create an explosion. There are numerous historic and current observations of trees exploding due to extreme cold,” the foundation explained.
Forecasters are also advising people in states like Minnesota and Illinois to stay inside or risk hypothermia.
The cold front is expected to peak later this week with the Big Apple dropping into the low teens and single-digit temps in upstate New York, according to meteorologists.
“It is dangerously cold. This Arctic air — an Arctic blast — is coming. It’s going to get worse before it gets better,” AccuWeather senior meteorologist Tom Kines told The Post.
New York City could see more than a foot — the most in the city since February 2021, when 16.8 inches fell in Central Park over a two-day period.
