A barrage of rain, sleet, snow, aggravation

Rain hardened into sleet then shifted into a whirlwind of snow, creating slick roads that led to a spike in spinouts and scattered power outages, officials said.

No major accidents were reported, but the weather ''contributed to a significant increase in the number of spinouts," State Police Sergeant Scott Range said last night, adding that the accidents occurred statewide. ''So far, it's been a few here and a few there."

Almost white-out conditions restricted visibility and created messy roadways, as sheets of snow mixed with bitter cold blanketed the area in a thin layer of ice.

The storm knocked out power for nearly 15,000 customers; utility companies blamed high winds and falling trees for much of the outages. NStar officials said that about 6,000 of its customers lost power, many of them in Framingham and Walpole, as well as the southern part of the state.

A spokeswoman for MassElectric said 8,600 customers were hit, mostly in the Merrimack and Blackstone valleys and Fall River.

Walter Drag, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Taunton, said last night's storm created a ''near blizzard condition," with snow slowly letting up. The snowfall was expected to end about 2 this morning.

The cold air that swept across the region last night was expected to make today a ''blustery and very cold, mid-January-like day," Drag said.

The storm, which was expected to drop 3 to 6 inches in the Boston area, is the latest in a series of snowstorms that have ranked this winter among the top six in terms of snowfall.

Globe Correspondent Amanda Pinto contributed to this report.