Surprise: It's Winter!
Record cold continued to hold a grip on a good part of the nation Tuesday, with temperatures hitting record low levels from Minnesota to Florida, including readings at the freezing point as far south as Alabama.
An unexpected cold-weather storm dumped several inches of snow near Truckee, Calif. About a dozen Cal-Tran plows and sand trucks were working late Monday in the higher elevations, reports CBS affiliate KOVR-TV.
"I miss the hot weather I was complaining about just a couple of weeks ago," said Marlene Anderson, 67, of Lawrenceville, Ga., where the low was 36 degrees on Monday. "I was just looking over my winter clothes and thinking, 'Gee, I need to go out and get some fleece.'"
Anderson raises Cavalier spaniels for show. "They like to go out and sniff around, but when it's this cold, they're ready to come right back inside."
Records overnight included 23 at St. Joseph, Mo.; 36 at Jacksonville, Fla.; 34 in Athens, Ga.; and 32 at Tupelo, Miss.
Shreveport, La., dropped to 38, the coldest there on Oct. 10 since record-keeping started in 1874. And it was the earliest freeze on record at El Dorado, Ark., and Longview, Texas.
Oct. 10 record books also were rewritten in Alabama, where Huntsville dropped below freezing for a second day, and in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, the weather service said.
Apple pickers had to wait an hour for frost to melt off the trees before they could start work at the Altamont Orchards near Albany, N.Y., where temperatures were around 30.
The late start will mean a late day, said orchard manager John Abbruzzese. "Instead of knocking off at five, we'll work 'til six, six-thirty," he said.
Temperatures dipped to about 33 degrees Monday in Newport, Ky., as about 2,200 customers of the utility Cinergy sat with no natural gas for heating. Company officials said crews were working 16-hour days to repair damage from a gas line rupture that happened Thursday.
A branch of the cold wave also reached into the Southwest, where a weekend ice storm sent tree limbs crashing onto power lines in the Texas Big Bend area. AEP West Texas Utilities said crews were working Monday to restore power to 4,500 home. Ice also caused weekend outages in parts of New Mexico.
"Hundreds and hundreds of trees have been destroyed or damaged across town," Brewster County Judge Val Clark Beard said Monday in Alpine, Texas.
The cold touched off snow showers around the Great Lakes and northern New England.
A foot of snow blanketed parts of northern Wisconsin and Michigan's Upper Peninsula during the weekend and some of it was still around Monday.
"We're building a golf course and the guys are working in the snow and a little bit of ice," said owner David Lundberg at Whitecap Mountain Ski Resort near Montreal, Wis.
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