Blizzard breaks Ohio records

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A heavy winter storm walloped Ohio’s capital city with more than 20 inches of snow, while blizzard conditions shut down highways and stranded air travelers across the state and parts of Indiana on Saturday.

High winds whipped the snow into 3-foot-tall drifts in some places and cut visibility to less than a quarter mile, the National Weather Service said.

“It’s horrible out there right now,” said 58-year-old Carman Bonfiglio, a FedEx Corp. driver who was stranded at a truck stop in Sunbury, about 20 miles northeast of Columbus. “Trucks are just spinning right here. In my days of driving I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The storm, which rolled in Friday, dumped 20.4 inches of snow on Columbus, breaking the city’s previous record of 15.3 inches set in February 1910, the weather service said. Cincinnati and Cleveland also received about a foot of snow.

Roads were impassable, prompting the county to declare a local emergency banning all vehicles except for emergency vehicles from the roads, authorities said.

It was a continuation of the storm that on Friday piled up snow a foot deep in Arkansas and blacked out thousands of homes and businesses from that state to the Great Lakes. Louisville, Ky., and parts of Tennessee got up to a foot, the weather service said.

Secondary roads and bridges were snow-covered and icy in Tennessee and Kentucky on Saturday morning, but much of that had melted by the afternoon.

One Ohio traffic death was blamed on the weather Friday, with two in western New York state and one in Tennessee. Two people were killed as tornadoes struck several Florida communities.

At Port Columbus International Airport, a plane skidded a few hundred feet off a runway while landing late Friday, but no one was hurt, airport spokeswoman Angie Neal said.

Many flights into and out of Ohio were delayed or canceled on Saturday.

All flights in and out of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport were canceled Saturday, airport spokesman Todd Payne said. Crews struggled all day to clear the runways.

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