Life Freeze: America Hit by Winter Storm

By Staff, Agencies 

A major winter storm battered the American Northern Plains and Upper Midwest with high winds and heavy snow on Wednesday, forcing hundreds of schools to close, grounding air travel and making road travel difficult in wide swaths of the US.

Few places were untouched by the wild weather, including some at the opposite extreme: long-standing record highs were broken in cities in the Midwest, mid-Atlantic and Southeast, US authorities and news agencies reported.

More than 50 million Americans were under winter weather advisories on Wednesday as the storm moved across a wide swath of the western and northern United States and into the East. Up to 2 feet [60 cm] of snow and winds of up to 60 miles/ hour were expected in some spots during the day and into Thursday.

The storm wreaked havoc on morning air travel. Some 3,500 flights were delayed or canceled across the nation, according to Flightaware.com. Travelers in Chicago’s O’Hare airport faced delays and cancellations.

The storm also produced a band of freezing rain stretching from central Iowa through Chicago and into southern Michigan, coating roads, trees and power lines with up to a 1/4 inch [0.6 cm] of ice, the weather service's Pereira said.

Snow-covered roads also will make travel treacherous in the Upper Midwest, and ice-covered power lines and falling trees could cause power outages late on Wednesday and into Thursday, said Frank Pereira, a forecaster with the weather service's Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.