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CHICAGO: A fierce Christmas blizzard forced scores of US churches to cancel services on Friday as snow and freezing rain brought a holiday headache to millions across a huge swath of the country.
At least 24 deaths were attributed to the nasty storm system that blanketed the central United States beginning on Wednesday, closing several interstate highways, stranding thousands of motorists in whiteout conditions and coating roads with a glaze of ice during one of the busiest travel periods of the year.
Hundreds of flights were cancelled on Thursday and Friday at airports from Minneapolis to Dallas.
The storm, the second brutal winter blast to sock much of the United States in the past week, was not expected to clear before Saturday.
"This is a holiday mess" spanning two thirds of the country, bringing severe thunderstorms to the Gulf Coast to ice along the eastern seaboard and a raging blizzard in the Midwest and plains states, said Chris Vaccaro, a spokesman for the National Weather Service (NWS).
"It's covering a tremendous amount of area and bringing record precipitation," he told AFP on Friday. "It's fairly unusual to have two record-setting storms in a week in mid- to late December."
The system dumped 35 centimetres of snow on Oklahoma City, an all-time record for the state.
In northern Oklahoma "a band of very heavy snow along with isolated thunder... was producing up to four inches of snow per hour," the Oklahoma City field office of the NWS warned.
Up to 61 centimetres of snow was expected by late Christmas Day in some northern states, with blizzard warnings issued from Texas up to North Dakota on the border with Canada.
Normally balmy Dallas, Texas was covered in 7.5 centimetres of snow, the first time the southern city had more than a trace of the white stuff on Christmas Day since 1926.
But while some were celebrating the scene, others were ruing the cancellation of Christmas services in several states, with churches citing the treacherous conditions. Local media outlets listed hundreds of closures.
At least seven people died on Nebraska roads, said Deb Collins, spokeswoman with the state Highway Patrol.
"There is near white-out conditions, heavy snow, blowing snow, wind gusts as high as 64 kilometres per hour, and a below zero wind chill," said Collins.
"It is not a great day for man or beast," she told AFP.
Collins said that authorities reported "numerous" crashes, and closed a 120 kilometres stretch of I-80, the main highway crossing the state.
In the central states, the NWS warned of "dangerous or impossible" travel conditions.
"Ice accumulations and winds will likely lead to snapped power lines and falling tree branches that add to the danger," said the forecaster.
Thousands of households were without power on Friday, including about 5,000 in the state of Iowa, the Des Moines Register reported.
In North Dakota, snowfall was forecast up to 41 centimetres in some places, along with temperatures as low as minus 34 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 36 Celsius).
Flood and tornado warnings were issued further south with roads in the state of Alabama underwater, and freezing rain and ice storms hit the states of North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Washington capital region, with more ice forecast for New England states, the NWS said.
South Dakota, Texas, Oklahoma and Minnesota declared states of emergency and called up National Guard soldiers to help dig out stranded travellers.
Betsy Graupe lost count of the number of vehicles she saw in the ditch while driving from Chicago to see her family in Minneapolis, a journey of some 570 kilometres.
"It was very, very bad out," said Graupe, who ended up pulling off the highway and spending a night in a hotel. "It was poor visibility, and icy and the road was rutted... it was quite an adventure."
The storm was also blamed for at least four deaths in Oklahoma, five in Kansas, three in Arizona, three in New Mexico, and one in Minnesota, local media and officials reported.
Along the southern US Gulf Coast, a powerful thunderstorm reportedly left one Louisiana man dead after a tree fell on his house.
The eastern US seaboard saw dangerous travel conditions Friday, with forecasters alerting freezing rain and heavy downpours from North Carolina up to New England.
Flood warnings were issued for parts of the northeast in anticipation of nominally rising temperatures later in the day, as snow from last weekend's storm melts.
This is the second major weather system to sweep the country in recent days, after a record-breaking snowstorm slammed the eastern seaboard on the final busy shopping weekend before Christmas. - AFP/de
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