A deep freeze set in across the Midwest on Sunday with low temperatures forecast in the single digits and a few below zero, turning the season’s first major snow into ice that made some roads treacherous to travel.
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Flight-tracking website FlightAware.com shows more than 130 flights into and out of O’Hare global Airport were canceled Sunday.
The National Weather Service said the snow, which first fell in South Dakota, Minnesota and Iowa on Friday, would continue in IL, in and MI before heading northeast into Canada late Saturday.
Swaths of the Midwest got a healthy dose of winter Saturday with up to 17 inches of snow hitting metropolitan Chicago, officials said.
“We have snow across the area with heavier amounts across northern IL”, said Amy Seeley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Chicago.
In Chicago, Stu Oppenheimer, like many other area residents, was out shovelling snow much earlier in the year than he usually has to.
Southside True Value Hardware manager Matt Krienke said business had been good in the days leading up to the storm in the Janesville, but that it had become “very, very, very, very slick”.
“A lot of people complaining about it, nobody wants to be out in it”, he said.
The IL Tollway, which maintains interstate tollways in 11 counties of the state, said it had 185 snowplows ready to go and 84,000 tons of salt stockpiled for the winter.
Chicago isn’t expected to get more snow on Saturday and won’t even see a chance of the white stuff until the day after Thanksgiving, Mott said.
Hope Peterson, 22, and Alex Cutler, 24, both of Sioux Falls, shovel the sidewalk in front of Cutler’s parents’ house during the first snow of the season Friday, November 20, 2015, in Sioux Falls, S.D.
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The wintry storm has dumped more than a foot of snow in Chicago’s northwestern suburbs, with one site reporting almost 15 inches. The three snowiest Novembers were: 1940 with 14.8 inches, 1895 with 14.5 inches and 1951 with 14.3 inches.
