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East-moving snow front hits schools, roads

Schools closed, highways were iced over and power was out as a winter storm packing snow, sleet and freezing rain moved east from the Midwest Friday.
Workers at Kansas City International Airport work to de-ice a Southwest Airlines flight Thursday. Heavy snow fell throughout the day causing school closings and slowing travel.
Workers at Kansas City International Airport work to de-ice a Southwest Airlines flight Thursday. Heavy snow fell throughout the day causing school closings and slowing travel.Keith Myers / The Kansas City Star
/ Source: The Associated Press

Parts of the Midwest saw still more snow Friday, leftover rain threatened to flood states from Mississippi to Maryland, and the white stuff was too much even for at least one ski resort as a storm front moved east.

Heavy ice caused trees to fall across power lines in southern West Virginia, leaving about 38,000 customers without electricity early Friday, and utilities couldn’t predict whether the worst had come.

“How long the ice is on the trees and how thick it is will determine how widespread this will be. It could be very ugly,” American Electric Power spokesman Phil Moye said.

Hundreds of schools closed. New Hampshire and western Maine were expecting up to 6 inches of snow by the end of the day, and parts of Kentucky and Tennessee were under water warnings after up to 5 inches of rain a day earlier.

Castana, in western Iowa, already had 23 inches of snow on the ground before the latest storm dumped 3 to 8 inches across the state Thursday and into Friday morning.

'Shove it wherever you can'
“Oh, you just deal with it,” said Sue Browning, who raises cattle with her husband just outside town. “You just take your tractor and shove it wherever you can.”

Steve Gannon, who traveled from Des Moines to Cedar Rapids, was less charitable, calling the storm “the worst I’ve ever driven through.”

“You could only follow the guy in front of you and hope he was paying attention,” he said.

Dispatchers in western Iowa guessed that at least 70 cars and trucks had ended up in highway ditches.

Snow was also still falling early Friday in Omaha, Neb., which got more than 5 inches Thursday and had a snowpack of 26 inches, an inch shy of its all-time record.

The 5.5 inches in Topeka, Kan., on Thursday crushed the record for the date, 2.5 inches in 1989, and the Kansas City area had 8 inches, its heaviest one-day snowfall since 10 inches fell in February 1993.

“There’s too much snow out there,” said Mike Tobin, deputy public works director for the Unified Government of Kansas City, Kan., and Wyandotte County. “It is wearing out our crews, murdering the budget and making us all cranky.”

Crash fatalities
A snowplow killed a pedestrian in Waterloo, Iowa, early Friday, and the snow was also blamed for at least five traffic fatalities since Wednesday, four in Nebraska and one in Missouri.

Another storm was expected to move into the Midwest on Sunday, bringing a chance for more snow.

Areas to the east, including parts of Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia, were warned of possible flooding. Even moderate rain was a concern because of the frozen ground.

“It’s not going to be able to absorb much at all in terms of the water run-off,” said Mike Gillen, a service hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Blacksburg, Va.

Snowshoe Mountain, West Virginia’s largest ski resort, suspended skiing Friday because it received 2.5 inches of rain and 5 inches of ice overnight, and heavy rain and flooding also closed roads in western Maryland.