Another ice storm headed our way
The National Weather service has issued a Winter Storm Watch for most of northern Illinois. According to forecasts, an ice storm will move into the area later this evening leaving as much as a half-inch of ice, in addition to sleet and snow.
The watch is in effect from late tonight to Tuesday morning.
Areas closest to the Wisconsin border would be the hardest hit, with those living south of I-88 and I-290 seeing the precipitation turn into rain later Tuesday.
The storm heading our way has already caked the center of the nation with a thick layer of ice today, blacking out more than 600,000 homes and businesses. At least 15 deaths in Oklahoma and Missouri were blamed on the conditions, with 13 of them killed on slick highways.
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A state of emergency was declared for the entire state of Oklahoma, where the sound of branches snapping under the weight of the ice echoed through Oklahoma City.
"You can hear them falling everywhere," Lonnie Compton said Monday as he shoveled ice off his driveway.
Oklahoma utilities said a half-million customers were blacked out as power lines snapped under the weight of ice and falling tree branches, the biggest power outage in state history, and utilities in Missouri said more than 100,000 homes and business had no power there.
"If you do the math, probably one out of three Oklahomans has no electricity at this point," said Gil Broyles, a spokesman for Oklahoma Gas Electric, the state's largest utility.
Roughly 11,000 customers were blacked out in southern Illinois and more than 5,000 had no electric heat or lights in Kansas, where Gov. Kathleen Sebelius was expecting requests from several counties for emergency declarations.
Ice was as much as an inch thick on tree limbs and power lines in parts of the region.
Schools across Oklahoma were closed and some hospitals were relying on backup power generators. The Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers sent 50 generators and three truckloads of bottled water from Texas to distribute to blacked-out areas of Oklahoma.
Tulsa International Airport had no power for about 10 hours and halted flight operations for the day, and most morning flights at Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City were canceled because of icy runways. Greyhound bus passengers were stranded overnight at a shelter in a church in Tulsa, and were joined by some local residents who had no heat.
Portions of Interstate 35 and Interstate 44 were shut down early Monday afternoon in Oklahoma City after ice-laden power lines collapsed and fell into the roadways.
Oklahoma utility officials said it could be a week or more before power was fully restored.
"This is a big one. We've got a massive situation here and it's probably going to be a week to 10 days before we get power on to everybody," said Ed Bettinger, a spokesman for Public Service Company. "It looks like a war zone."
The Oklahoma City suburb of Jones, a town of 2,500 people, had low water pressure because there was no electricity to run well pumps, and firefighters said an early morning fire destroyed most of the community's high school.
The icy weather stretched into the Northeast, where many schools across upstate New York were closed or started late because of icy roads.
On ice-covered Interstate 40 west of Okemah, Okla., four people died in "one huge cluster of an accident" that involved 11 vehicles, said Highway Patrol Trooper Betsey Randolph.
Eight other people also died on icy Oklahoma roads, and Missouri had one death on a slippery highway. In addition, a homeless person died of hypothermia in Oklahoma City, the state medical examiner's office said.
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Associated Press writers Jeff Latzke in Oklahoma City, Marcus Kabel in Springfield, Mo., John Milburn in Topeka, Kan., and Cheryl Wittenauer in St. Louis contributed to this report.