Winds, cold ice over Midwest, head Northeast

Temperatures plunge
In Rhinelander, Wis., temperatures dropped from 37 degrees on Tuesday to minus 19 overnight.

“It is like one day it is spring and the next day you are in the middle of never-never land,” said Bill Larson, 60, who lives two miles to the east. “You are in the same place, but it is like two different worlds.”

In Chicago, rush-hour commuters scurried to work through the bitter cold.

“I’m actually looking forward to work,” said Tom Gilmartin.

Two major highways in southern Minnesota reopened early Wednesday as wind died down and snow stopped falling, but the state remained in a deep freeze, with the temperature dipping as low as minus 27 in the northeast.

As the sometimes unpredictable storm barreled eastward Tuesday, tornadoes or reports of tornadoes surfaced in several communities.

A tornado hopscotched through Louisville, Ky., on Tuesday night, tearing the roofs from several buildings and toppling trees and power lines. Joe Sullivan, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said there were three tornadoes in the metro area.

In Indiana, severe thunderstorms packing wind gusts of 80 mph killed three people in mobile homes and a fourth who died in a car crash, authorities said. Firefighters pulled the bodies of an elderly woman and her daughter from a mobile home flipped over by the wind Tuesday night near Poseyville in southwestern Indiana.

The weather week began with heavy snow pummeling mountain areas from Washington state to northern Arizona as two storms converged, one from California and another from the Gulf of Alaska, meteorologists said. Another storm soon followed.

A fourth was on the way to the interior West. “By Thursday, the next storm will be right on our doorstep. This is quite a storm system,” Breidenbach said.

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