Storm Leaves 21 Dead Across Midwest, Northeast

A snow and ice storm smashed through the Midwest and into New England on Friday, after weeks of temperatures so mild that folks in city after city were bemoaning the wimpy winter.

The storm was blamed for at least 21 deaths in eight states. Power was out to hundreds of thousands of homes in Missouri, Oklahoma, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and New York. Sheets of ice coated roads in many states, making travel treacherous. “There are going to be some busy tow trucks across Nebraska,” said Terri Teuber of the state’s highway patrol. “There are a lot of vehicles in ditches.”

Ditto for western New York, not far from Buffalo.

“We’ve been through the freezing rain and the ice, and [Friday morning] we had winds gusting up to 50 mph,” said Gordon Dibble, chief deputy in charge of road patrols for the Genesee County Sheriff’s Department. “So now we have many, many, many power lines down, trees blown over, jackknifed tractor-trailers, cars rolled into the ditch. We’ve got just about everything there is.”

In a typical year, a storm like this one would be just another aggravation, another entry in the log of winter woes. This year, however, it was big news because, in many of the states that were hardest hit, the storm broke a string of days so warm that January felt a lot like April.

In Milwaukee, for instance--which got 6.7 inches of snow, a local record, Thursday--the average temperature in January was nearly 8 degrees higher than usual. There was so little snow that the city’s road salt reserves, heaped in towering mounds, offered the most tempting sledding around.

In Lawrence, Kan., fishermen were catching 10-inch crappies all last month, long after the lakes typically are frozen solid. In Des Moines, golfers were lining up putts in T-shirts and shorts. Dairy Queens in Nebraska were doing a brisk business selling ice cream. And in St. Paul, Minn., an annual winter treasure hunt ended early when a teenager found the prize as he was kicking some leaves in a park that’s typically buried under at least a foot of snow.

All that warm weather led some die-hards to gripe that winter wasn’t winter without chapped lips and frozen beards.

Kids wanted snow days off from school and hockey games on the ponds. Ice fishermen wanted ice.

“That’s why we live here, for the changing of the seasons,” explained Jan Fascilione, who works at a skating rink in Downers Grove, Ill., a Chicago suburb.

Fascilione got her changing seasons, and then some, when the storm dumped 13 inches of snow Thursday on Downers Grove. By Friday, she was regretting her fair-weather enthusiasm for winter. She had wanted a dusting of snow, she said, “but not this much.” She had wanted winter to settle in, “but not this quickly.”

The storm that rolled through the Midwest and Northeast actually originated in Southern California, where it was relatively mild, just cold air and a surprise dusting of snow. But as it pushed east across the Rockies, the storm system smacked into a stream of cold air coming south from Canada and a jet of warm, moist air coming north from the Gulf of Mexico.

The result: Schools closed, airports delayed flights and power lines went down one after another as snow and freezing rain seized city after city.

Snow fell for 30 hours straight in Omaha; the roads were so slick that the state highway patrol did not even risk sending tow trucks out until the storm eased Friday. In Kansas City, Mo., meanwhile, tree limbs fell with such rapid-fire thuds that one resident said it sounded like someone was blasting away with a shotgun. In Oklahoma, utility officials called the storm the worst in a century and warned that 225,000 customers might be without power for days.

Heavy rains pelted Boston on Friday. Northern New England reeled from the season’s biggest snowfall. Freezing rain atop 10 inches of snow in Vermont forced many businesses and even state government offices to close. In Maine, the mix of snow, sleet and rain prompted meteorologist Bob Marine of the National Weather Service to predict, “We’re going to have a little of everything.”

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Times staff writer Elizabeth Mehren in Boston contributed to this report.