MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) – A blizzard dumped heavy snow on the midwestern United States, disrupting highway and air travel on Tuesday as it moved east toward the Ohio Valley and the mid-Atlantic states.
More than 1,000 flights were canceled in and out of Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway airports and nearly 100 more were canceled in and out of Minneapolis-St.Paul International Airport, according to the FlightAware.com flight tracking service.
Heavy snow and patches of ice made driving difficult along the highways in parts of North Dakota, Minnesota and northwest Illinois on Tuesday. Chicago was forecast to get 6 to 10 inches of snow.
The storm was expected to move eastward over the Ohio Valley and then the central Appalachians and mid-Atlantic states on Wednesday, hitting Washington with its biggest snowfall of the winter, the National Weather Service said.
The snowstorm roared into North Dakota on Monday, blowing snow and drifts up to 3 feet (0.9 meter) high. The North Dakota Transportation Department urged people to stay off the roads across the northwestern part of the state.
But the state took the latest storm in stride.
“It’s a normal late winter storm for us,” said Adam Jones, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Bismarck.