One shelter, Room in the Inn, said some religious organisations that typically would transport people to the shelter had to cancel because of icy roads.

“It’s the snow and the ice that, in the South, it shuts us down,” said Rachel Hester, director of Room in the Inn. “We become paralysed. We don’t have the infrastructure.”

Tony Stokes, 58, has been at one of the shelters all week. Last Sunday, he said, he initially tried to spend the night under an overpass but woke up shivering and surrounded by snowflakes. “I just laid there, and it got a little too chilly for me,” said Stokes, who has been unable to afford housing since moving from Georgia a year ago. “You think you can tough it out.”

Metro Nashville staff members made welfare checks on senior and disabled residents by phone instead of in person because of road conditions, according to the city’s social services officials.

Sam Siple, an official with Nashville Rescue Mission, a nonprofit shelter, said demand for services has been especially high.

Icy roads have meant fewer volunteers, and staff members have been stretched thin with more people to prepare for. Some workers have had to stay overnight, he said. “It has been an intense week,” Siple said.

The freezing weather comes just months after much of the south experienced a brutal summer of unrelenting heat and humidity, and weeks after scientists concluded that 2023 was the planet’s hottest year on record. As the world warms, cold spells can still occur occasionally, although they are becoming less frequent and less severe in many places. And even though much of the United States is currently experiencing icier-than-normal conditions, Earth as a whole has been warmer than average this month because of unusually high temperatures in other parts of the globe.

The National Weather Service warned of a weekend filled with Arctic air that will “dominate the eastern two-thirds of the country”.

In the mid-Atlantic and Eastern regions – specifically parts of West Virginia, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania – winter-storm warnings were in effect, with heavy snow and slippery conditions expected.

Farther south, below-freezing temperatures were forecast to spread to much of the Gulf Coast region except southern Texas and the southern half of the Florida Peninsula. The cold air was also expected to continue to trigger more lake-effect snow in the Great Lakes region on Saturday.

In Knoxville, Tennessee, which was under a wind-chill advisory, Erin Read, the executive director of the Knoxville-Knox County Office of Housing Stability, was bracing for another weekend of dangerously cold air.

Warming centres in Knoxville have sheltered more than 270 people so far, Read said, adding that the city received two years’ worth of snow in a week.

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When the warming centres initially opened last week, they exceeded their capacity of 125 people on the second day, Read said. There are four centres open now, and they are still over capacity. But they have made space.