Deadly ice and snow storm cut swath across US

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Obama's snow jibe meets icy rebuff in Washington
Shivering Washington residents gave a chilly reception Thursday to a sarcastic dig from President Barack Obama over their inability to cope with wintry weather. Obama got an icy blast from the Washington Post after the city's most famous incomer expressed disbelief that his daughters' school had shut down Wednesday -- in line with schools in the city's suburbs -- because of "some ice." "Mr Obama can make pronouncements from inside his well-shoveled bubble, but we can report that it was pretty treacherous out there in the real world," the Post wrote in an editorial after a number of road accidents. "School administrators who opted for closure made the right call -- this time. To the Obamas, we say: Welcome to Washington, and, hey, you have it easy. At least one parent has the flexibility to work from home," the newspaper said. The president said Wednesday his new city needed to acquire some "toughness" from his hometown Chicago, where winters are long, deep, and bitterly cold. But as several residents wrote on the Post's website, Washington, unlike northern cities like Chicago, is not geared for the kind of bone-chilling ice storm that engulfed the region this week. And while the city's tendency to panic at the first snowflake is a familiar bone of complaint for natives and newcomers alike, local authorities insisted that the rink-like roads posed a deadly danger. Washington mayor Adrian Fenty, who is depending on Obama to give city residents voting rights in Congress, said the decision to delay Wednesday's opening of downtown schools for two hours was not taken lightly. "We remain sensitive to the needs of families who are not able to arrange child care when schools must unexpectedly close and to the children who depend on a healthy meal (at school)," he said. Obama's daughters, Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, attend the private Sidwell Friends School. It follows the weather closure policy of schools in the city's Maryland suburbs, which were all shut down Tuesday and Wednesday.

by Staff Writers
Chicago (AFP) Jan 28, 2009
Hundreds of thousands of people were left shivering in the dark after a massive ice and snow storm cut a swath across the United States Wednesday, knocking down power lines, snarling traffic, grounding flights and forcing schools to close.

Freezing rain on the southern end of the storm covered trees and bridges with brilliant ice crystals but made roads incredibly slick and dangerous from Texas to Pennsylvania.

At least a dozen deaths were reported.

The northern side of the snow dumped as much as a foot (30 centimeters) of snow in some areas of Ohio and the US east coast.

And with a cold front moving in behind the storm it could be days before the ice melts and weeks before all the damage is repaired, officials warned.

"It's a pretty big storm," said meteorologist Bruce Sullivan of the National Weather Service.

"We won't know the full scope of this until people get their power back on."

The storm formed Monday over the southern plain states and Texas and moved steadily east and north, Sullivan said. Some areas got ice on top of snow.

"It looks as though with this accelerating so fast by tomorrow morning it will move into eastern Canada," Sullivan said.

"We don't really see anything on the horizon for the next few days but with a low pressure system moving in behind this it'll cool down quite a bit."

The Oklahoma Highway Patrol responded to more than 1,000 weather related collisions on Monday and Tuesday, 130 of them involving injury. Two people were killed.

More than a hundred accidents were reported from midnight to 9 am Wednesday in the city of Dallas alone and a two people died in Texas, the Dallas Morning News reported.

Heavy ice brought down tree limbs and power lines, blew out transformers and caused a number of fires in Kentucky, where several cities were completely without power.

"There are some areas of the state that have been very hard hit and some utilities that lack backup generators so that is affecting water service," Jill Midkiff, a spokeswoman for Kentucky governor Steve Beshear, told AFP.

Three people were killed in Arkansas, where emergency shelters were opened after power and phone lines were knocked down by the ice, officials said. Five storm-related deaths were reported in Missouri.

But the storm also provided for some lighter moments.

President Barack Obama, who recently moved from the icy city of Chicago to relatively temperate Washington, joked about how the US capital proved unable to cope with some winter weather.

"As my children pointed out, in Chicago school is never cancelled," Obama told reporters.

"In fact, my 7-year-old pointed out that you would go outside for recess. You wouldn't even stay indoors. So it's -- I don't know. We're going to have to try to apply some Chicago toughness. I'm saying, when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things."

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Avalanche Kills 10 In Turkey And 7 In French Alps

Ankara (AFP) Jan 25, 2009
An avalanche in northeastern Turkey engulfed and killed 10 people Sunday with seven others from the group making a miraculous escape, Anatolia news agency reported.

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