Deadly winter storm arrives in US Midwest
Weather Storm approaching Mid-West
A “humongous” and deadly winter storm is spreading across the US Midwest, with freezing rain and heavy snow causing road and air transport chaos.
The worst of the storm is expected to hit late on Thursday and dump up to 2ft (61 cm) of snow by Christmas Day.
Icy roads were blamed for the deaths of 12 motorists, mostly in Nebraska, Kansas and Arizona. Some 100 flights leaving Minneapolis were cancelled.
The US East Coast is still recovering from last weekend’s record snowfall.
Tens of thousands of people in West Virginia and Virginia are still without power.
The National Weather Service (NWS) issued blizzard warnings early on Thursday for Kansas and parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska and the Texas panhandle.
“There’s just a humongous storm moving across the centre of the country, basically from the Canadian border to Texas and spreading from west Colorado to Illinois,” Pat Slattery, a spokesman for the National Weather Service, told AFP news agency.
“We would recommend that people if at all possible postpone their travel plans just to be on the safe side,” he said. “This is not a storm to be messed with.”
He said freezing rain and high winds was making driving extremely dangerous.
The NWS winter storm warning for South Dakota said it was a “life-threatening system”.
The latest storm began in the south-west on Tuesday, causing blizzard-like conditions and travel chaos, before spreading to the east and north.
Meteorologist Scott Blair warned that gusts would reach 40 mph (64 km/h) in central Kansas, and that “blowing snow” would greatly reduce visibility.
South of the storm system, heavy thunderstorms will produce flooding across Texas and into the Ohio Valley, forecasters warned.
More than 1,300 customers were without power in Iowa with temperatures hovering around freezing on Thursday, the Iowa Association of Electric Co-operatives said.
The governor of South Dakota issued a state of emergency even before the storm hit, and urged residents to stay off the roads until the storm passed.
Flights at Chicago’s two main airports were running on schedule, officials said, after the storm forced the cancellation of more than 260 flights on Wednesday.
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