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A major winter storm was lashing much of the East Coast on Sunday, causing widespread power outages and disrupting travel over the holiday weekend.

The big picture: Heavy snow and ice accumulations were “likely to produce hazardous travel,” downed trees and more outages from the Mid-South to the Northeast, per the National Weather Service. Some parts of the U.S. can expect to see up to a foot of snow through Monday.

• Tens of thousands of customers were without power overnight due to the wintry storm, which spawned two tornadoes in southwest Florida Sunday morning — including an EF-2 tornado with maximum winds of 118 near Fort Myers, Lee County, which injured at least three people, per the NWS.

By the numbers: Nearly 34,000 customers were without power in North Carolina and another 30,000-plus had no electricity in South Carolina on Monday morning, according to poweroutage.us.

• Other states with widespread power outages were Georgia (over 27,000), Pennsylvania (almost 26,000) and Virginia (more than 16,000), per the utility tracking site.
• More than 3,000 flights within, into or out of the U.S. were canceled and over 8,000 others were delayed on Sunday, FlightAware data shows.

Threat level: “Heaviest snow is expected along and just west of the Appalachians, and the most damaging icing is likely across parts of North Carolina,” the NWS said.

• “Thunderstorms may produce damaging winds and tornadoes in Florida and the eastern Carolinas. Strong winds and coastal flooding are also expected.

Arctic air already in place across the central and eastern U.S. will work in concert with this dynamic system to deliver a wide swath of more than a foot of heavy snow northward across the upper Ohio Valley through the lower Great Lakes, as the storm center is forecast to track up the interior section of the East Coast through Monday.

“Closer to the track of the storm center, snow that initially falls is expected to change over to a period of sleet and/or freezing rain before changing over to plain rain across interior Mid-Atlantic and up through the lower elevations of New England.”

— NWS outlook

Meanwhile, weather agency Environment Canada warned 8-16 inches of snow could fall on Monday morning over parts of southern and eastern Ontario, near the border with the U.S.

In photos: Scenes from monster storm

Editor’s note: This article has been updated with details of flight cancellations, power outages and Canada’s forecast.