By Marcus Kabel
 Students,
walking to school, are dwarfed by power towers as they fight their
way across an open field, during a winter storm, in Pickering
east of Toronto December 12, 2000. The storm slugged parts of
the central United States into Canada, dumping more than a foot
of snow as fierce winds carried bitter Arctic cold across the
region.
DALLAS (Reuters)
- Winter storms punished the south-central U.S. on Wednesday with
snow, sleet and freezing rain from Texas to Missouri, snarling
highways and air traffic and leaving over 200,000 homes without
power.
As salt trucks
and utility crews worked to repair the damage, the storm front
rolled northeast along a line from southern Illinois to New York
across states already hit by snowstorms in the past two days.
Sleet, freezing
rain and snow fell from late on Tuesday well into Wednesday from
west Texas and Oklahoma to Arkansas and Missouri.
Power outages
hit 100,000 homes in north Texas and more than 120,000 in Arkansas
as ice pulled down power lines and snapped tree limbs.
Airlines reported
widespread cancellations across the region, including most flights
from Dallas-Fort Worth, the nation's fifth largest airport, and
renewed delays at Chicago O'Hare as new snow fell after a Monday
blizzard.
At O'Hare
late Wednesday night two planes bumped while on taxiways during
the snowstorm but there were no injuries reported. Monique Bond,
a spokeswoman for the Chicago Department of Aviation, said the
wing tip of one plane brushed the other in the equivalent of a
"fender bender.'' Initial reports said the two planes were
a Northwest Airlines NWAC.O jet and a Turkish Airways jumbo jet.
O'Hare, which
had not recovered fully from more than a foot of snow earlier
in the week, was hit with another 4 inches of snow on Wednesday,
forcing major carriers there to cancel nearly half of their flights.
Dozens of travelers were forced to spend the night at the airport.
"This
is a very widespread system,'' said Dan McCarthy with the Storm
Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma, a division of the U.S.
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
"It's
been a while since we've had a widespread storm system like this,''
he said, adding this kind of winter front was a return to normal
after disruptions for most of the 1990s caused by El Nino and
La Nina Pacific Ocean weather patterns.
The National
Weather Service (news - web sites) issued snow and sleet warnings
for most of Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania on Wednesday night
and in New York on Thursday.
Sleet and
freezing rain piled up as much as two inches (5 cm) of slush across
north, west and central Texas late on Tuesday and early Wednesday.
Heavy Snowfall
In St. Louis
Officials
in St. Louis said the snowfall there was the heaviest since a
storm in February 1993 that dumped 11 inches (28 cm) on the area.
By midafternoon about 6 inches had come down and more was expected.
One of the
biggest traffic problems in St. Louis was on a bridge across the
Mississippi River that carries several converging Interstate routes,
including I-70, a major east-west continental highway. Stalled
trucks and closed ramps created a daylong bottleneck on the span.
In Arkansas, a predawn wreck involving 15 vehicles including several
tractor-trailers shut down Interstate 40 near Memphis, Tennessee,
for several hours. No major injuries were reported by state police.
The storm
played havoc with air travel in the affected region and, by domino
effect, all over the country.
United Airlines,
the world's largest carrier, said it was forced to cancel 280
flights on Wednesday out of 2,300 systemwide due to problems in
Texas and the lower Midwest.
In addition
flights were canceled at Chicago's O'Hare where snow was again
falling and where operations were just returning to normal from
Monday's foot-plus (30 cm) snowfall. Another three to six inches
(7.5-15 cm) was forecast for the Chicago area, on the northern
edge of the storm.
United, a
unit of UAL Corp., said a forecast for the ice storm to reach
Dulles International Airport near Washington forced some preemptive
cancellations of flights headed there.
Extensive
Power Outages
Extensive
power outages were reported across Arkansas, especially in the
southern half of the state.
"As of
11 this morning, statewide we have 123,000 of 630,000 residential
customers without power in 63 counties.'' said James Thompson,
spokesman for Entergy Corp., the state's largest electric utility.
Thompson said
the number without power would grow.
"Trees
and power poles are going to keep snapping and they're going to
bring down more lines...Tonight it will refreeze, and the limbs
that haven't broken off will break off,'' he said.
Ice buildup
on power lines and falling limbs knocked out electricity to about
100,000 customers across north Texas.
In Dallas,
one man was reported killed when his pickup truck slid off an
icy overpass and flipped over. Dallas police also reported over
200 minor collisions.
In Oklahoma,
state police reported no deaths but numerous traffic accidents
across nearly all of the state.
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