DALLAS (AP) — A massive winter storm sweeping across the United States spawned tornadoes that leveled homes and injured a handful of people in parts of Oklahoma and Texas, including the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, at a time when Much of the center of the country, from the Rocky Mountains to the Midwest, was bracing for snow Tuesday.
An area stretching from Montana to western Nebraska and Colorado was under blizzard watches, and the National Weather Service said up to 2 feet (61 centimeters) of snow might fall in parts of western Dakota. southern and northwestern Nebraska. Ice and sleet were expected on the eastern Great Plains.
The storm system was expected to lash the upper Midwest with ice, rain and snow for days, moving northeast and into the central Appalachians, dropping snow and freezing rain by Wednesday. in the evening. The severe weather threat also remained in effect through Wednesday for Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and northwestern Florida, according to the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Oklahoma.
In the South, a string of thunderstorms moving over north Texas and Oklahoma early Tuesday brought tornadoes, winds, hail and downpours, National Weather Service meteorologist Tom Bradshaw said. Authorities on Tuesday reported dozens of damaged homes and businesses and several people injured in suburbs and counties north of the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area.
The weather agency was reviewing a dozen areas in North Texas on Tuesday to determine if the damage was caused by high winds or by tornadoes.
A tornado watch prompted the Dallas-Forth Worth International Airport, located near Grapevine, to issue a shelter-in-place order early Tuesday, asking passengers to move away from windows. More than 1,000 flights leaving and arriving at the airport were delayed and more than 100 cancelled, according to the FlightAware tracking service.
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Groves reported in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Associated Press writers Ken Miller in Oklahoma City; Jill Bleed in Little Rock, Arkansas; Sam Metz in Salt Lake City; Trisha Ahmed in Minneapolis; Jesse Bedayn in Denver and Margery Beck in Omaha, Nebraska contributed to this report.
