"Did you think winter was over? Think again!" the weather service's office in Blacksburg, Virginia, said in a post on the social platform X. Snow and sleet blew into western Virginia and North Carolina early in the day, with the system expected to give way to freezing rain in the afternoon, the weather service said.
Appalachian Power, which serves 1 million customers in West Virginia, Virginia and Tennessee, said it requested 700 additional workers from neighboring utilities to assist with problems.
About 65 Virginia National Guard soldiers were at facilities along the Interstate 95 and state Route 29 corridors and in southwest Virginia to support the storm response, guard officials said. Another 20 soldiers and members of the Virginia Defense Force were in support roles.
Troops with heavy-duty trucks were organized in chainsaw teams to help clear roads and power line routes. Black Hawk helicopters with rescue hoist capabilities were also on standby.
Winter storm warnings extended from Kentucky to southern New Jersey, and the snow-and-ice mix was expected to become all rain by Wednesday afternoon as temperatures climb.
Meanwhile a separate storm system was expected to dump heavy snow on an area stretching from Kansas to the Great Lakes starting Tuesday night, the weather service said. The Kansas Legislature canceled Wednesday meetings because of the weather, and Gov. Laura Kelly closed state offices in the capital, Topeka.
Treacherous travel
In Virginia, where Gov. Glenn Youngkin declared a state of emergency and schools and government offices were closed Tuesday, state police reported dozens of accidents, including four injuries. The Department of Transportation advised people to stay off the roads.
With snow in the forecast for the Washington, D.C., area, the Office of Personnel Management recommended that federal workers leave their offices early in the afternoon. Schools in and around Baltimore also let out early.
In southern West Virginia, multiple crashes temporarily shut down several major highways. Smith’s Towing and Truck Repair responded to at least 15 calls, mostly from tractor-trailer drivers who got stuck on Interstate 64 in Greenbrier County near the Virginia border, dispatcher Kelly Pickles said.
“Basically they just get sucked over into the median or they go off of the interstate just a little bit on the right-hand side,” she said. “And they just don’t have enough power in their vehicles to get back onto the road due to the icy conditions.”
‘A wonderland’
Paige Williams, who owns Downtown Books in Lexington, Virginia, described a kind of “fluffy snow that sticks to things” that was coming down heavily and limiting visibility at her home outside the city in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“It makes it just like a wonderland,” Williams said. “It’s beautiful out here. It’s sticking to the evergreens and to some of the rock walls. And it’s really just gorgeous.”
Williams, 58, closed her store with as much as 9 inches (about 23 centimeters) of snow in the forecast. She hoped to reopen Wednesday, noting that Lexington and surrounding Rockbridge County are dependable when it comes to clearing the roads.
But with temperatures on either side of freezing Tuesday night and Wednesday, the rain that is supposed to follow could make the roads better or worse.
“It’s just going to depend on where those temperatures go,” Williams said. “Rain can clear things off. And rain can also freeze. And then you have a lot of skating rinks instead of roads.”
Frigid temperatures
An Arctic air mass stretched from Portland, Oregon, to the Great Lakes.
In Detroit, where temperatures dropped into the lower teens (about minus 11 Celsius), two children under age 10 died, likely from exposure, after they were discovered with other family members Monday in a van in a casino parking garage, police said. Their family may have been living in the van.
The temperature bottomed out Tuesday morning at minus 31 degrees (minus 35 degrees Celsius) in Butte, Montana, where over the past two winters at least five people died from cold exposure, said Brayton Erickson, executive director of the Butte Rescue Mission.
Advocates for the homeless in the city of about 35,000 were out on the streets distributing sleeping bags, jackets, mittens and other cold weather gear to anyone who needed them, according to Erickson. Overnight Monday into Tuesday, 36 people were jammed into the 16-bed rescue mission to escape the cold.
“When it gets this cold, we kind of pull out all the stops,” Erickson said.
In North Dakota, all 12 beds at the Minot Area Men’s Winter Refuge were full, executive director Mike Zimmer said, as the temperature dipped to minus 17 (minus 27 Celsius).
“You go outside, that wind is like steak knives going into your body within the first couple seconds,” Zimmer said.
In Oregon's Multnomah County, officials extended a state of emergency through at least Thursday. Five emergency shelters were set to open Tuesday night through Wednesday afternoon. Midweek wind chill readings could dip to 10 degrees (minus 12 Celsius) in Portland, the weather service said.
Atmospheric river
Forecasters said an atmospheric river was expected to arrive in California starting Thursday, according to Brian Hurley, a senior meteorologist with the service’s Weather Prediction Center. The forecast was for heavy rain along the coast and into the central valleys along with heavy snowfall in the Sierra Nevada through Saturday.
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Associated Press writers from across the U.S. contributed to this report.
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