A major winter storm crippled Kansas City, Mo., and Oklahoma City on Thursday with a heavy coating of ice that glazed highways, snapped tree limbs and left hundreds of thousands of people without electricity.
The belt of ice and snow at one point wreaked havoc from the Texas Panhandle to upstate New York and nearly all points in between. At least 15 deaths were blamed on slick roads or freezing temperatures.
Hundreds of schools were closed in Illinois, Indiana, Oklahoma, Michigan, Kansas, Nebraska and New York.
Oklahoma and Missouri were hit the hardest, with an icy rain lacquering everything in sight. Utility officials in Kansas said it was the worst storm in memory and warned it could be days before all power is restored.
At its peak, the storm left 270,000 customers without power in Kansas City and 200,000 in Oklahoma.
At least 185,000 were in the dark in parts of Michigan and Indiana.
“That makes this easily the worst storm we have ever experienced,” said a Kansas City Power and Light spokesman.
