(Reuters) – The first major winter storm of the new year swept into the U.S. mid-Atlantic states on Monday morning, closing down federal offices and public schools in Washington, D.C., after dumping a foot of snow in parts of the Ohio Valley and Central Plains.
About five inches (12.7 cm) had fallen in the nation’s capital by 8 a.m. on Monday, according to the U.S. National Weather Service, with up to eight inches in some surrounding areas of Maryland and Virginia. The snow was forecast to continue throughout the day before the system pushes out to sea on Monday evening.
Severe travel disruptions were expected across the storm’s path, and officials urged drivers to stay off the roads if possible. Governors in several states, including Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, West Virginia, Virginia and Maryland, have declared states of emergency.
In the wake of the storm, dangerously frigid Arctic air was filling the void, bringing freezing rain and icy conditions to a swath of the country stretching from Illinois to the Atlantic coast. The unusually cold temperatures are expected to linger for the rest of the week.
The Central Plains, where the storm dumped heavy snow over the weekend, were already in a deep freeze. Parts of Kansas experienced bitter cold wind chills, with values from 5 to almost 25 degrees Fahrenheit below zero (minus 15 to 32 degrees Celsius) overnight. The cold air will persist, with daytime highs only in the mid teens to lower 20s.
The airport in Kansas City recorded 11 inches (28 cm) of snowfall, the highest for any storm in more than 30 years, the National Weather Service said. The Missouri State Police said it had responded on Sunday to more than 1,000 stranded motorists and 356 crashes, including one fatality.
In Washington, the storm will not keep the U.S. Congress from meeting on Monday to formally certify Republican Donald Trump’s election as president, House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday. But federal offices in the nation’s capital will be closed, the Office of Personnel Management said.
Hundreds of schools announced in advance that they would not open on Monday due to the storm, including public schools in Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Washington and Philadelphia.
The storm also left more than 330,000 homes and businesses in the central and southern U.S. without power on Monday, data from PowerOutage.us showed.
As of 11 a.m. EST (1600 GMT), more than 1,600 flights within, into and out of the United States had been canceled, according to the FlightAware.com tracking service. Amtrak canceled dozens of trains on the busy Northeast Corridor line between Boston and Washington.
The three airports serving the D.C. area – Reagan National, Baltimore/Washington International and Dulles – were all open, with crews working to clear the airfields of snow, but were seeing many flights delayed or canceled.
(Reporting By Hannah Lang, Joseph Ax, Jonathan Allen and Frank McGurty; Editing by Bernadette Baum and Bill Berkrot)
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