22 Dead as Storm Spreads Snow, Freezing Rains Through East

A storm that dumped up to 13 inches of snow on Tennessee spread freezing rain and snow flurries to the East Coast on Friday, after forcing hundreds of persons to seek refuge in National Guard armories. The bad weather was blamed for at least 22 deaths.

The system brought the first snow of the winter to Atlanta Friday, forced police to lower the speed limit on the slick New Jersey Turnpike, prompted travelers’ advisories from Alabama through Pennsylvania and into New England and caused innumerable traffic accidents.

On Friday, stranded motorists began straggling out of the National Guard armory in Lonoke, Ark., a town of about 4,000 persons, where Arkansas National Guard Sgt. Leroy Sternhagen estimated that 300 travelers had stopped for the night.

“We also had dogs, cats and one little baby,” Sternhagen said. “Everybody made it through fine. Even the karate studio opened, and they put people on the floors on those mats they use for that stuff.”

A guard armory opened in Cairo, Ill., also, taking in more than 80 stranded motorists.

“It’s bad, very bad. We’ve had anywhere from 8 to 10 inches, depending on the drifts, and it’s still snowing very hard,” Alice Cox, a state police clerk, said.

In Memphis, where 8 inches of snow fell Thursday, gas space heaters were blamed for fires that killed three children.

The storm was losing its punch as it headed east, but it continued to put “an inch or two” of snow down across a wide area, said Jeff Behrens, a meteorologist with the National Severe Storms Center in Kansas City, Mo.

Light snow lingered from northeast Mississippi and northern Alabama to western Kentucky and middle Tennessee, and there were scattered reports of freezing rain and sleet from the central and upper Ohio Valley to northern Delaware, the National Weather Service said.