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By Stav Danaos, BBC Weather Centre The storm is expected to cause widespread disruption BBC - A "humongous" and deadly winter storm is spreading across the US
Midwest, with freezing rain and heavy snow causing road and air
transport chaos.
The worst of the storm is expected to hit late on Thursday and dump up
to 2ft (61 cm) of snow by Christmas Day. Icy roads were blamed for the deaths of 12 motorists, mostly in
Nebraska, Kansas and Arizona. Some 100 flights leaving Minneapolis were
cancelled. The US East Coast is still recovering from last weekend's record snowfall. Tens of thousands of people in West Virginia and Virginia are still
without power. The storm system developed across western parts of the US, producing
dust storms across the desert areas of California and Arizona. The same system is now currently across the Midwest and is generating
severe blizzards from Kansas to Minnesota. As the system pushes eastwards, forecasters expect an ice storm to
affect large parts of the interior of the north-east US during Christmas
Day and Boxing Day. The National Weather Service (NWS) issued blizzard warnings early on
Thursday for Kansas and parts of North Dakota, South Dakota, Wisconsin,
Minnesota, Nebraska and the Texas panhandle. "There's just a humongous storm moving across the centre of the country,
basically from the Canadian border to Texas and spreading from west
Colorado to Illinois," Pat Slattery, a spokesman for the National
Weather Service, told AFP news agency. "We would recommend that people if at all possible postpone their travel
plans just to be on the safe side," he said. "This is not a storm to be
messed with." He said freezing rain and high winds was making driving extremely dangerous. The NWS winter storm warning for South Dakota said it was a
"life-threatening system". In Louisiana where powerful thunderstorms struck, the death of one man
was blamed on high winds after a tree fell on his home. The latest storm began in the south-west on Tuesday, causing
blizzard-like conditions and travel chaos, before spreading to the east
and north. Meteorologist Scott Blair warned that gusts would reach 40 mph (64 km/h)
in central Kansas, and that "blowing snow" would greatly reduce visibility. South of the storm system, heavy thunderstorms will produce flooding
across Texas and into the Ohio Valley, forecasters warned. More than 1,300 customers were without power in Iowa with temperatures
hovering around freezing on Thursday, the Iowa Association of Electric
Co-operatives said. The governor of South Dakota issued a state of emergency even before the
storm hit, and urged residents to stay off the roads until the storm passed. Flights at Chicago's two main airports were running on schedule,
officials said, after the storm forced the cancellation of more than 260
flights on Wednesday. Nearly 100 flights from Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport were
cancelled on Thursday with dozens of cancellations. The Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City shut down one of its
three runways and cancelled nearly 30 flights, while at Houston's Hobby
Airport there were two-hour delays.
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