all right 20 million people in the northeastern u.s. are under winter weather alerts as yet another storm system moves through that area. the national weather service says up to 10 inches of snow could fall in parts of maine and new hampshire. rapid bands of heavy snowfall are expected starting monday afternoon, which could make road conditions very dangerous. pakistan has been hit with a massive power outage. a breakdown in the national power grid left much of the nation without electricities. the ministry of energy says system maintenance work is progressing rapidly and power has been restored in a limited number of grids in islamabad. let s see if we have any electricity? good news from your side. reporter: hi, max.
no good news just yet. there are parts of the city of islamabad which do have power, but the entire country is abuzz with the hum of generators because from the north to the south this country of 220 million people does not have any power. there s actually not really been proper explanation of when we can expect the power to be restored across the country. you ve got schools, hospitals, construction sites, et cetera, all running on backup power at the moment. and the fact is, cost of living crisis in this country, fuel prices have already skyrocketed. the people who can afford to have generators here in the winter in pakistan, most of them can t afford to get the fuel. we are seeing long fuels at power stations, petrol pumps. as night descends and the cold creeps in, people have enough fuel to kind of make sure that their heaters are up and running.
i mean, the fourth city of pakistan, it is the financial center of the country. that doesn t have any power. we have seen we re hearing from telecom companies they can only operate their entire systems on backup power for a certain amount of time. if the power does not come back in the next couple of hours, we will see some communication outages as well. pakistan is suffering from a fuel crisis, from an economic crisis that is having a historic low. this is really the tip of the iceberg of when it comes to crises hitting the country at the moment. max? sofia in islamabad, thank you. in china concerns of covid haven t stopped millions celebrating the year of the rabbit with celebrations. residents travel to see family for the lunar new year. but there are fears that traveling could cause covid
are dark. a live report from islamabad for you after this break. because it stinks. telell me why i don t know i ve washed it so many times. tell me why no youou tell me why i can t get rid of this odor. have e you tried new downy rinse and refresh. itit doesn t just cover up odors, it helps remove them 3x better than detergent alone. guess the odor went bye bye. no, that s not us. sorry. rinse odor away with new downy rinse and refresh.
addressing the conference in geneva, the un secretary general antonio guterres called for investment to help pakistan recover from what he called a climate disaster of monumental scale . our correspondent in islamabad, caroline davies, says the focus will now be on pakistan s resilience and disaster planning for the future. this is not the first time we have seen flooding in pakistan, but this was climate carnage as per his description. this is excessive flooding, this is not the thing that pakistan normally sees but we did see flooding back in 2010 on a dramatic scale as well. the questions were what lessons were learned from 2010. what measures were in place from how well did they work and would they be able to cope in the future. questions about drainage, questions about infrastructure are being built to sustain it. there are still people who have those questions as well. but of course the next stage is that there are some of these