Snow, Cold, Storms pound the Midwest
CHICAGO - Severe thunderstorms, tornadoes and fierce winds sliced through the Midwest this week and took aim at the Northeast early Wednesday, leaving behind bitterly cold air and blizzards in the northern Plains that sent temperatures in some areas plummeting by 50 degrees in a few hours.
The bad weather reached upstate New York by early Wednesday and forecasters warned that the arctic blast would send mercury tumbling across the Northeast and New England. „This is going to be a hard, vicious slap in the face from Mother Nature”, Gino Izzi, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Romeoville, Illinois, said Tuesday night. „The temperature drop we saw was really spectacular in a bad way.”
The temperature in Buffalo, New York, went from a high of 54 degrees Tuesday to 21 degrees by 7 a.m. Wednesday, with winds gusting to more than 60 mph. Power was out in 40,000 homes and businesses, roads were slick and most schools in the Buffalo area were closed. In northern Illinois, high winds downed power lines and knocked trees onto utility lines, causing nearly 14,000 customers to lose power overnight, mostly in Chicago’s south suburbs, said ComEd spokeswoman Judy Rader. Service to all but 1,300 had been restored by Wednesday morning.
Thousands also were without power in Ohio and Illinois. In Michigan, Lower Peninsula residents were in the dark as blizzard conditions hit the western and northern parts of the state.
The winds and thunderstorms may have killed two people in Indiana on Tuesday, authorities said. Firefighters in southwestern Indiana pulled two bodies from a mobile home near Evansville that had been turned on its side by winds in a thunderstorm, WEHT-TV reported.
Wind gusts as high as 70 mph created problems for air travel and avalanche warnings were issued for some Western regions. Tornadoes or reports of tornadoes surfaced in several communities in the nation’s midsection. „I wouldn’t call it a common occurrence to see winds this strong with this kind of snow”, Izzi said. „This isn’t something we see every year.”
The system also dragged frigid air across the northern Plains. The Weather Service reported midday temperature Tuesday of minus-24 degrees at Glasgow, Montana. North Dakota registered wind chill factors of minus-54 degrees at Garrison, while Williston hit a low of minus-24 degrees.
Most of Minnesota was under wind chill warnings until noon Wednesday due to indexes that fell into the minus-30 degree level. It was as low as 50 degrees below freezing in Hibbing. Though only light snow fell in western, central and eastern Iowa on Tuesday, winds snapping as fast as 60 mph caused visibility problems, and temperatures dropped into single digits.
„It’s a little worse than your average snowstorm”, said Rod Donovan, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Des Moines, Iowa.
The weather week began with heavy snow pummeling mountain areas from Washington state to northern Arizona as two storms converged, one from hard-hit California and another from the Gulf of Alaska, meteorologists said. The storms were followed Tuesday by a third that threatened to leave up to 20 inches of snow in Idaho’s mountains, said Jay Breidenbach of the Weather Service office in Boise, Idaho. A fourth storm was on the way to the interior West: „By Thursday, the next storm will be right on our doorstep. This is quite a storm system”, Breidenbach said.
In the snow farther west, avalanche danger forced officials to close Interstate 90 at Snoqualmie Pass, Washington state’s main east-west artery across the Cascade Mountains. The pass was to remain closed until Wednesday morning, Meagan McFadden of the state Department of Transportation said. More than 200 trucks were backed up at North Bend, waiting to move freight across the pass. On a typical weekday, as many as 7,000 trucks travel I-90 over Snoqualmie Pass, she said. (AP)
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