A major winter storm will finish carving a path from the central United States and the Midwest to the nation’s capital by Monday morning, after having punished multiple states with a mix of sleet, snow, blizzards and freezing rain.
Kansas was particularly hard hit. Most of the state was under winter storm and blizzard warnings on Sunday. In the Kansas City metropolitan area, residents hunkered indoors amid ice- and snow-covered driveways, and roads deemed too treacherous for travel.
Rapidly falling snow accumulated more than four inches in two hours on Sunday morning. Some areas experienced lightning and booming thunder along with wind gusts of up to 35 miles an hour as the storm moved across the region.
“This is a rare blizzard for Kansas City,” Gary Lezak, a longtime meteorologist in the area, said on Sunday. “It is insanely cold. This storm still has 12 hours to go as the blizzard intensifies.”
The storm caused numerous crashes over the weekend. West of Salina, Kan., a fire truck, multiple tractor-trailers, and passenger vehicles overturned. Several trucks went spiraling into ditches as icy roads became impassable.
On Sunday morning, Ben Gardner, a trooper with the Kansas Highway Patrol, shared on social media that he was at the I-135 and I-70 interchange in Saline County, where Kansas Department of Transportation crews and emergency responders were battling treacherous weather and road conditions.
Source: National Weather Service Notes: Snowfall forecast for . Updated . Results show the nearest location where such data is available. By Aatish Bhatia, Josh Katz and Bea Malsky
Source: NOAA
Note: Forecast temperatures are as of 7 a.m. Eastern each day. Forecast data in some areas may be unavailable. Data shown only for the contiguous United States.
By The New York Times
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