Not Just The GTA: U.S. Hammered By Bad Weather
Posted December 17, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The GTA slogged through its first major winter snow commute of the season on Wednesday, after up to 10 centimetres of snow fell overnight, leaving the roads and sidewalks a slippery, sloppy mess.
But we’re a lot better off than our neighbours to the south. A wide swath of the U.S. is digging out from a major blowout with Mother Nature that’s left schools closed, planes grounded and roads filled with accidents over several midwest and western states.
There are no classes for kids in parts of Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee and Illinois, after those states received up to half a foot of snow in some areas.
At least 300 flights were cancelled at Chicago’s busy O’Hare Airport, leaving thousands of travellers temporarily stranded.
Authorities in the northern part of Texas shut down highway overpasses because they were too slippery to navigate.
There were similar problems in Oklahoma, where a glaze of ice gave surfaces a beautiful sheen – except on the roads, which became treacherous.
More than 20 centimetres of snow was expected in Washington state, from north of Seattle to the B.C. border. Some places in higher elevations got up to 2 feet.
Adding to the misery was the cold, as temperatures plunged to -35C in northern Minnesota – without the wind chill.
And the New England states were bracing for the worst, as winter storm warnings were posted there. The bad weather will be especially unwelcome in hard hit New Hampshire (top left) and Maine, which got clobbered by an ice storm last week. As many as 106,000 people in the former state and up to 7,800 in the latter have been without power since then.
Another 70,000 haven’t had electricity in Massachusetts in days.
At least 20 people have died from the storm, including 11 killed in traffic accidents.
And there aren’t many places to find warmth. Residents in Southern California, which normally conjures up images of surf, sand and sun, were discovering what their car heaters were for, as temperatures hit the low single digits on Wednesday.
Photo credit: Darren McCollester/Getty Images
