COLUMBUS, Ohio - A heavy winter storm walloped Ohio's capital city with more than 20 inches of snow, while blizzard conditions shut down highways and stranded air travelers across the state and parts of Indiana yesterday.
High winds whipped the snow into 3-foot-tall drifts in some places and cut visibility to less than a quarter mile, the National Weather Service said.
"It's horrible out there right now," said 58-year-old Carman Bonfiglio, a
The storm, which rolled in Friday, dumped 20.4 inches of snow on Columbus, breaking the city's previous record of 15.3 inches set in February 1910, the weather service said. Cincinnati and Cleveland also received about a foot of snow. In Indiana, 14 inches of snow fell in Milan, which is about 60 miles southeast of Indianapolis, the weather service said. Roads were impassable, prompting the county to declare a local emergency banning all vehicles except for emergency vehicles from the roads, authorities said.
It was a continuation of the storm that on Friday piled up snow a foot deep in Arkansas and blacked out thousands of homes and businesses from that state to the Great Lakes. Louisville, Ky., and parts of Tennessee got up to a foot, while northern Mississippi got 5 to 7 inches of snow, the weather service said.
Secondary roads and bridges were snow-covered and icy in Tennessee and Kentucky yesterday morning, but much of that had melted by the afternoon when temperatures climbed into the upper 30s.
One Ohio traffic death was blamed on the weather Friday, with two in western New York state and one in Tennessee.
A warm up was not expected until Tuesday, when the forecast called for temperatures in the lower 40s, the weather service said.
