Midwest still suffering effects of arctic blast

Midwest still feeling effects of arctic blast

Disruptions caused by painfully cold weather persist, including power outages and canceled flights and trains.

The painfully cold weather system that put much of the Midwest into a historic deep freeze was expected to ease, though temperatures still tumbled to record lows in some places Thursday.

Disruptions caused by the cold will persist, too, including power outages and canceled flights and trains. Crews in Detroit will need days to repair water mains that burst Wednesday, and other pipes can still burst in persistent subzero temperatures.

More cold

Before the worst of the cold begins to lift, more frigid weather is expected. Record-breaking cold hit northern Illinois on Thursday, when the temperature in Rockford dropped to negative 30 degrees. The previous record in the city, northwest of Chicago, was negative 27 degrees Jan. 10, 1982.

Schools in parts of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, Illinois and Iowa remained closed. But students headed back to school Thursday in eastern North Dakota, where the weather was forecast to crawl out of double-digit subzero temperatures.

Flying woes

About 1,700 flights in and out of Chicago’s airports have been canceled in the past 24 hours amid the frigid weather in the Midwest, with experts saying the cold is affecting transit operations.

Airline experts say the double-digit subzero temperatures affect manpower, equip- ment and fueling at airports. United Airlines has brought in heated tents for its employees at O’Hare and added workers to increase shifts.

Why so cold

The bitter cold was the result of a split in the polar vortex, a mass of cold air that normally stays bottled up in the Arctic. The split allowed the air to spill much farther south than usual. In fact, Chicago was colder than the Canadian village of Alert, one of the world’s most northerly inhabited places. Alert, which is 500 miles from the North Pole, reported a tem- perature that was a couple of degrees higher.

Deadly outcome

At least eight deaths were linked to the system, including an elderly Illinois man who was found several hours after he fell trying to get into his home and a University of Iowa student found behind an academic hall several hours before dawn. A man was struck by a snowplow in the Chicago area, a young couple’s SUV struck another on a snowy road in northern Indiana and a Milwaukee man froze to death in a garage, authorities said.