By
Associated Press
OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - A winter storm system that
blew through Christmas Day with Gulf Coast tornadoes and snow in the
nation's midsection headed for the Northeast on Wednesday, spreading
blizzard conditions that slowed holiday travel.
The death toll rose to six with car accidents on snow and sleet-slickened highways in Arkansas and Oklahoma.
Post-Christmas travelers braced for flight delays
and a raft of weather warnings for drivers, a day after rare winter
twisters damaged buildings in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
Snow blew across southern Illinois and southern
Indiana early Wednesday as the storm tracked up the Ohio River valley
toward the Eastern seaboard and New England.
There were whiteout conditions in parts of
southwestern Indiana, where 6 inches or more of snow had fallen by
midmorning around Evansville. State police reported dozens of vehicles
stuck after not being able to get up a hill on a central Indiana
highway, while some roads around Evansville were impassable with wind
gusts around 30 mph.
A blizzard warning was in effect for much of the
state's southern two-thirds and more than a dozen counties issued travel
watches asking residents to make only essential driving trips.
"People need to not travel. They need to just go
where they're going to be and stay there," said Rachel Trevino, a
meteorologist at the National Weather Service bureau in Paducah, Ky.,
which covers southwestern Indiana.
In snowy Arkansas, the storm left more than 189,000 customers without electricity Wednesday, utility Entergy Arkansas said.
Severe thunderstorms were forecast for the
Carolinas while a line of blizzard and winter storm warnings stretched
from Arkansas up the Ohio River to New York and on to Maine.
Thirty-four tornadoes were reported in Texas,
Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama during the outbreak Tuesday, the
National Weather Service said.
Rick Cauley's family was hosting relatives for
Christmas when tornado sirens went off in Mobile. Not taking any
chances, he and his wife, Ashley, hustled everyone down the block to
take shelter at the athletic field house at Mobile's Murphy High School
in Mobile.
It turns out, that wasn't the place to head.
"As luck would have it, that's where the tornado
hit," Cauley said. "The pressure dropped and the ears started popping
and it got crazy for a second." They were all fine, though the school
was damaged, as were a church and several homes, but officials say no
one was seriously injured.
Camera footage captured the approach of the large funnel cloud.
Mobile was the biggest city hit by numerous
twisters. Along with brutal, straight-line winds, the storms knocked
down countless trees, blew the roofs off homes and left many Christmas
celebrations in the dark. Torrential rains drenched the region and
several places saw flash flooding.
More than 750 flights around the U.S. were canceled
as of Wednesday morning, according to the flight tracker
FlightAware.com. The cancelations were mostly spread around airports
that had been or soon would be in the path of the storm.
Holiday travelers in the nation's much colder
midsection battled treacherous driving conditions from freezing rain and
blizzard conditions from the same fast-moving storms. In Arkansas,
highway department officials said the state was fortunate the snowstorm
hit on Christmas Day when many travelers were already at their
destinations.
Two passengers in a car on a sleet-slickened
Arkansas highway died Wednesday when the vehicle crossed the center line
and struck an SUV head-on. In Oklahoma, the Highway Patrol said a
76-year-old Wisconsin woman died Tuesday when the car she was riding in
was hit head-on by a pickup truck on Interstate 44.
The Oklahoma Highway Patrol had earlier reported
that a 28-year-old woman was killed in another crash Tuesday on a snowy
highway. The storm's winds were blamed Tuesday for toppling a tree onto a
pickup truck in Texas, killing the driver, and another tree onto a
house in Louisiana, killing a man there.
Trees fell on homes and across roadways in several
communities in southern Mississippi and Louisiana. Mississippi Gov. Phil
Bryant declared a state of emergency, saying eight counties reported
damages and some injuries.
It included McNeill, where a likely tornado damaged
a dozen homes and sent eight people to the hospital, none with
life-threatening injuries, said Pearl River County emergency management
agency director Danny Manley.
The snowstorm that caused numerous accidents pushed
out of Oklahoma late Tuesday, carrying with it blizzard warnings for
parts of northeast Arkansas, where 10 inches of snow was forecast.
Freezing rain clung to trees and utility lines in Arkansas and winds
gusts up to 30 mph whipped them around, causing about 71,000 customers
to lose electricity for a time.
Christmas lights also were knocked out with more
than 100,000 customers without power for at least a time in Texas,
Arkansas, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.
Blizzard conditions were possible for parts of
Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky up to Cleveland with predictions of
several inches to a foot of snow. By the end of the week, that snow was
expected to move into the Northeast with again up to a foot predicted
Jason Gerth said the Mobile tornado passed by in a
few moments and from his porch, he saw about a half-dozen green flashes
in the distance as transformers blew. His home was spared.
"It missed us by 100 feet and we have no damage," Gerth said.
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