TOLEDO, Ohio (AP) — Pileups on the Ohio Turnpike
involving at least 50 vehicles killed three people and seriously injured
a state trooper on Wednesday as a late-winter storm swept through the
Midwest and the Northeast, ending a fleeting spring-like thaw.
Emergency
workers on the busy toll road struggled to reach accidents and stuck
vehicles because of snowy conditions and traffic backups. Pileups
stretched across a 2-mile section in the eastbound lanes of the turnpike
between Toledo and Cleveland. Another series of pileups about 10 miles
to the east shut down the turnpike’s westbound lanes near Sandusky.
Drivers
sat for hours, a few braving the cold to stretch their legs, said Mike
Ramella, a salesman from the Cleveland suburb of Westlake.
"I’m just sending emails, still working," said Ramella, who was in the middle of a 7-mile
backup.
A
trooper responding to an accident was pinned between vehicles, said the
Ohio State Highway Patrol, which confirmed the deaths of the three
other people but didn’t immediately have further details. One vehicle
lane opened about four hours after the first accident.
Trooper
Andrew Clouser, 29, was in serious but stable condition at a Toledo
hospital Wednesday night, said Ohio patrol Staff Lt. Anne Ralston.
Across the region, people fired up snow blowers, hoisted shovels and slogged through sloppy and
treacherous commutes.
Tens
of thousands of homes and businesses in northern Illinois and Indiana
lost power, and a few hundred flights were canceled at Chicago’s
airports. The city, where streets and sidewalks had only just dried out
for the first time in months, got about 6 inches of snow. Heavy winds
whipped it into a blinding wall that even blotted out the lit-up skyline
for a few hours before dawn and left trees glazed with gloppy gobs of
white.
People from Chicago to Buffalo, N.Y., were left wondering whether the start of spring was really just a
week away.
"I
think spring is buried under all the snow, and I’m just ready for it to
go," said Kelly Smith, huddling with her husband under an awning in
downtown South Bend, Ind., waiting for a ride. "I came out this morning
with no coat on, and it’s snowing again. I think Mother Nature just has
some attitude."
Wednesday’s storm was moving east, hitting the
Great Lakes in Ohio, Pennsylvania, upstate New York and parts of New
England. Some places, including Vermont, where 2 feet of snow was
forecast, could see their heaviest snowfalls of the winter before the
storm dissipates over Canada.
Meteorologists warned that as much
as 9 inches of snow could fall in parts of southeastern Michigan by
Wednesday evening, with 4 to 8 inches in Detroit. Hundreds of schools
were closed there, and drivers traversing slippery roads fell victim to
rear-end collisions, ended up in ditches or had other snow-related
mishaps. AAA Michigan said it responded to 900 calls for help, mostly in
the southern part of the state.
The picture was similar in
upstate New York, where hundreds of schools called off classes after the
weather service warned that a blizzard with winds of up to 50 mph could
paralyze the area from western New York to the Adirondacks.
Ed
Szymanski was just finishing his first pass with the shovel outside a
Buffalo post office when he declared that he’d had enough of winter.
"Too long," he said of the season as snow hit his eyeglasses and melted into droplets.
The late-winter storm was helping to edge snowfall totals toward the top of the record books.
Totals
in southeastern Michigan could come close to breaking a 133-year-old
record. The storm was likely to move the Detroit area close to the
seasonal snow total record of 93.6 inches set in 1880-81, the weather
service said.
Chicago had already been buried this winter by 75.5
inches of snow, the fourth most on record dating back to 1884-85.
Wednesday’s snow pushed the seasonal total into third place, ahead of
the 77-inch total from 1969-70.
After a few days of tantalizingly
warmer temperatures, the return to snow-covered streets and trees was a
jarring sight. Workers in downtown Chicago grunted as they heaved slush
with well-worn shovels. Others rushed to return sidewalk signs warning
pedestrians of ice falling from skyscrapers.
A tour boat company
that ferries sightseers along the Chicago River even announced it was
delaying this weekend’s planned rollout of vessels from winter storage
because they were encased in 20-inch-thick ice. Temperatures Friday are
forecast in the 50s.
But there were some gluttons for winter punishment reveling in another blitz of squalling snow.
One of them was bookstore owner Ken Peczkowski, of South Bend, Ind., who was happy to be out shoveling
again.
"It
makes me feel alive," he said. "Summer just drags me down. Winter, I
feel like I have to fight for every day of life, and that’s great. It’s
good exercise."
Peczkowski said he remembers worse winters, including the blizzard of ’78, when the city received a
record 172 inches of snow.
"We made it through that, too," he said. "I think we were open every day."
Others
have been searching at least for a feeling of spring, including some
who stopped to check out the house plants and cheery garden items at
Jeff Gatewood’s nursery in the Indianapolis suburb of Fishers.
"Everybody’s
got so much pent-up energy, it’s going to make for a crazy spring,"
Gatewood said. "Spring fever is really going to be pretty high this
year."
___
Associated Press writers Tom Coyne in South Bend,
Ind., Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, N.Y., and Rick Callahan in
Indianapolis contributed to this report.
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