POWERFUL WINTER STORM HAMMERS D.C., SOUTHEAST

Federal government offices and schools in the Washington, D.C., area were closed Monday as the region received its first significant snowfall of the season, part of a winter storm that left more than half a million customers without power as it moved up the East Coast.

“A major winter storm is underway,” the National Weather Service said Monday morning, while warning, “Snow-covered and slippery roads along with heavy snowfall and low visibility will make travel dangerous.”

The storm dropped about more than 14 inches of snow in parts of northern Virginia, while Washington recorded up to 8 inches, said Andrew Orrison, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in College Park, Md. In central Tennessee and northern Alabama, which caught the tail end of the storm, snowfall totals reached 9 inches, the weather service said.

The storm was moving north Monday afternoon through Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey, where snowfall totals ranged from 6 to 15 inches by Monday night, Orrison said.

In North Carolina, the storm brought strong winds and snow to the mountains in the western part of the state, while up to 2 inches of rain fell in Greensboro, Raleigh and Durham, breaking daily records for rainfall set in 1992.

As of Monday evening, more than 376,000 customers in Virginia were without electricity, while outages affected 55,000 customers in North Carolina and more than 50,000 in Maryland, according to PowerOutage.us, which aggregates data from utilities across the United States.

SUSAN WALSH AP James Penn cross country skis in Annapolis, Md., on Monday. A winter storm packing heavy snow rolled into the District of Columbia, Virginia and Maryland, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of customers.