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December 24, 2009

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Snowstorm snarls holiday travel

A MAJOR winter storm is promising to bring a white Christmas to parts of the West and Midwest of the United States and also threatening to cause long delays and tough driving conditions for countless holiday travelers.

The storm was expected to dump more than 30 centimeters of snow on parts of Colorado and southern Utah, and blow east into the Plains states through Christmas Day. Blizzard warnings were likely on Christmas Eve in Kansas.

"Pretty much the entire central and southern Rockies are going to get snow, and then it's going east and will drop more snow," said Stan Rose of the National Weather Service in Pueblo, Colorado.

South Dakota Governor Mike Rounds declared a state of emergency on Tuesday. The National Weather Service in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, warned of treacherous travel conditions from yesterday through tomorrow, calling the storm "life threatening."

The Nebraska State Patrol urged drivers yesterday to use extreme caution when venturing out on the roads across the central third of the state because the roads are slick as freezing rain and snow had started to fall.

A day earlier a Colorado woman was killed when her SUV apparently hit black ice and slid across a median in western Nebraska.

Blustery weather had already snarled traffic in Arizona, with blizzard-like conditions shutting down roads and causing a pileup involving 20 vehicles on Tuesday. South of Phoenix, a dust storm set off a series of collisions that killed at least three people.

A tropical jet stream pumping in moisture from the storm's south was likely to cause plenty of snow as the storm headed into the Plains states.

A winter storm watch was in effect for most of southeast Colorado, the panhandle of Oklahoma and north Texas through today. By Tuesday afternoon, light snow was falling in Salt Lake City.

No major airport delays were reported there or in Denver.

Elsewhere, holiday travelers scrambled to adjust their plans before the snow storm hit.

In Denver, Sarah McAnarney and her husband planned to leave town yesterday to visit family in Ozark, Missouri, with their springer spaniel, Olive. But forecasts prompted them to skip a day of skiing in the Rockies and start driving a day early.

McAnarney said she was caught in a blizzard two weeks ago in the Rockies and needed four hours to drive 160 kilometers from Vail to Denver. She said she didn't want to repeat the experience.

"I was driving through a whiteout," she said on Tuesday at a truck stop east of Topeka, Kansas. "You couldn't see over your headlights."




 

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