Midwest Digs Out, Braces for More Snow

CHICAGO —  After two mild winters, weather wonks and hat salesmen across the Midwest this fall have been predicting an early and bracing reminder of the joys of a serious snow season.

On Tuesday, millions of residents were digging out from beneath that accurate bit of soothsaying--and girding themselves for another storm due to arrive today.

Winter, meanwhile, is still more than a week away.

The arctic storm buried Milwaukee under more than 13 inches of snow, a one-day record for December. Chicago got 15 inches, only to be bested by 16 inches in Detroit. And the mercury fell with the flakes, plunging to 7 degrees below zero in Chicago--which was downright balmy, compared with Embarrass, Minn., which bottomed out at 35 below, the nation’s low.

“We’ve gotten so used to mild winters that this has been kind of a shock,” said meteorologist Chad Pettera of Kansas-based WeatherData Inc. “It’s definitely cold for this time of year.”

The storm due today will be milder, forecasters say, but is nonetheless expected to dump as much as 10 inches of snow in parts of Missouri and Kansas--and 3 or 4 inches in the cities hit hardest Monday and Tuesday.

The first storm snarled highway traffic in northern Indiana on Tuesday, where the National Guard dispatched soldiers in Humvees to rescue motorists. It complicated rail traffic in Chicago, where commuters were left stranded on wind-swept suburban train platforms. And it made a complete mess of the nation’s air-traffic system.

On Monday, Chicago city officials and several major airlines all but begged people to stay away from O’Hare International Airport--pleas that turned the typically chaotic complex into a wide-open, centrally heated jogging facility for one delayed traveler.

“I had some people watch my suitcase and I did six or seven miles,” said George Beckham, 42, a zoning inspector from Coventry, Ohio. With the exception of a stop at the metal detector, he jogged unimpeded through one of the world’s most congested airports. “I ran in all three terminals. I ran in the tunnels. It was really neat, really empty.”

By Tuesday morning, it was neither as tens of thousands of travelers who didn’t make it out Monday scrambled to book new flights--even as airlines continued to cancel hundreds of them.

The snow had stopped falling, but it continued to blow and drift at O’Hare. United Airlines, which is based in Chicago, alone canceled 175 flights.

In Detroit, Northwest Airlines canceled 125 flights. More than 160 flights into and out of New York’s La Guardia Airport were canceled due to high winds. Passengers headed to Boston faced four-hour delays, according to the Federal Aviation Administration--and those headed into Newark, N.J., could expect just about twice that.

As the snowstorm headed east out of the Ohio Valley, the winds swept in--toppling hundreds of power poles and cutting electricity to more than 300,000 customers. Some 60,000 Pennsylvanians lost power as well, utility companies said.

In Flint, Mich., the Flint Journal decided not to publish Tuesday after just one press operator made it to work through the 12-inch snowfall. Officials figured they wouldn’t be able to deliver the newspaper anyway.

In Detroit, officials launched a convoy of 290 plow and salt trucks (compared with Chicago’s 250 vehicles) in an attempt to avoid a repeat of January 1999, when streets became so clogged after a blizzard that the city screeched to a famous near-halt.

Those responding Tuesday to a Detroit News online poll, however, suggested that the city still had much to learn in the area of snow removal. Asked to rank the city’s efforts, more people voted for the facetiously worded worst option--”There were snow plows out?”--than for any other.

Plows were definitely out and about in the Detroit suburb of Livonia. Michael Sharum saw them. But it was snowing hard, blowing hard, and Sharum decided late Monday to do the prudent thing: Spend the night at a Krispy Kreme doughnut shop.

“I looked outside and thought, ‘Man, it’s a mess,’ ” the 28-year-old assistant manager of the shop said Tuesday morning. “I figured, well, I could drive home and get stuck in a snowbank or I could stay here where’s there’s hot cocoa and doughnuts.”

He survived on three chocolate glazed.