Blizzards rolled into parts of Wyoming and South Dakota on Friday, bringing the snow-savvy states to an unseasonably early winter standstill and forcing a tourist town to cancel its annual Octoberfest’s polka-dancing bar crawl.
The storm dumped 33 inches of snow in a part of South Dakota’s scenic Black Hills near Lead, “and it’s still coming down,” National Weather Service meteorologist Eric Helgeson said Friday afternoon.
Wind gusts reached as high as 68 miles per hour just outside the weather service office in downtown Rapid City, where 8 inches of snow had accumulated, Helgeson said.
In northwest Nebraska, three people were killed in an accident on snow-slicked U.S. 20 Friday morning, authorities said. The storm system also generated a tornado in Nebraska, blanketed Colorado’s northern mountains with snow and was threatening to push strong thunderstorms as far east as Wisconsin. Forecasters said the cold front would eventually combine with others to make for a wild, and probably very wet, weekend for the central U.S. and Southeast.
The cold front is moving slowly east and expanding south and will meet up with the remnants of Tropical Storm Karen on Saturday or Sunday, after that storm makes landfall along the Gulf Coast.
Though much of the Midwest and Southeast may get soaked, it won’t be as devastating as past combination storms, such as Superstorm Sandy, said William Bunting, operations chief at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla. Sandy resulted from the merging of cold fronts and a tropical storm.
The Midwest, especially Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa, are at most risk for large thunderstorms, tornadoes and hail, “perhaps baseball-sized hail,” Bunting said.
The weather, which even forecasters said was rare, prompted Deadwood officials to postpone their annual Octoberfest, including Friday night’s dancing-and-singing pub crawl and today’s Wiener Dog Races and Beer Barrel Games.
Officials were warning drivers to stay off the roads in the Black Hills and in eastern Wyoming, where reports of 5 to 10 inches of snow were common. Forecasters urged travelers to carry survival kits and to stay in their vehicles if they get stranded.
“I’ve lived in Wyoming my whole life and I’ve never seen it like this this early,” Patricia Whitman, shift manager at the Flying J truck stop in Gillette, said in a telephone interview. She said her truck stop’s parking lot was full of travelers waiting out the storm.
“I know several of the businesses nearby are completely closed because they can’t even get workers into work — it’s pretty nasty,” she said.
The snow also snapped tree limbs that knocked out power lines in parts of the state, causing thousands of people to lose power.
It was a similar scene at the typically bustling Pilot Travel Center in western South Dakota near Rapid City, about 40 miles southwest of Deadwood. It was like a ghost town Friday morning, which store general manager John Barton attributed to drivers likely heeding forecasters’ warnings to stay off the roads.
“Yesterday we were really busy,” Barton said. “I think a lot of people got ahead of it.”
By Friday afternoon, South Dakota officials had closed I-90 from the Wyoming border to Wall — a 110-mile stretch. No travel was advised in Rapid City, where first responders were overwhelmed with calls for stuck vehicles and downed trees and power lines making some roads impassable. Police spokeswoman Tarah Heupel said snow and ice was accumulating on traffic signals, making the lights difficult to see.
Large hail and powerful winds were forecast for northwest Oklahoma later Friday, while heavy rain settled in parts of Iowa and was expected to swoop northeast across the region into Wisconsin.
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