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A major winter storm is headed for the southwestern Great Plains, with blizzard conditions expected by Monday afternoon in parts of New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado, the National Weather Service warned Sunday.

There’s a better than 90 percent chance that Interstate 40 in eastern New Mexico and northwest Texas will be closed because of low visibility and blowing snow by late Monday afternoon, said Kerry Jones, a weather service forecaster in Albuquerque, N.M. The same is true for Interstate 25 from New Mexico into southern Colorado and other highways across the region.

Up to 15 inches of snow is expected in northeastern New Mexico, the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado, which were under blizzard watches or warnings Sunday afternoon. The storm is expected to hit at the beginning of a holiday travel week that is one of the busiest of the year.

“We try to reserve these blizzard watches for very intense storm systems,” Jones said.

Much of Kansas will be affected, with the heaviest snowfall from southwestern Kansas, south into the Oklahoma panhandle, south toward Amarillo, Texas, and west into the New Mexico plains.

Jones warned people in the region not to be fooled by Sunday’s pleasant weather ? the storm is expected to move in quickly and is potentially life-threatening.

The intense low-pressure system was circulating south of Yuma, Ariz., Sunday, but was expected to move into southwestern New Mexico overnight. Rain will develop first, but the system is expected to intensify and turn colder, with snow expected in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, N.M., by midday. Up to 4 inches could fall in the foothills around Albuquerque, and Santa Fe could get up to 5 inches.

Much heavier snow is expected as the storm moves to the northeast along the Great Divide and into the plains, where winds above 40 mph may create near white-out conditions along highways. Clayton, N.M., near the Texas-Oklahoma line, could see the most snow it’s measured in five years, estimated at 15 inches or more. One area outside Amarillo could get up to 18 inches.

“Those are tremendous amounts of snow,” Jones said. “Add to that the fact that that snow is going to be blowing, and you’re going to have winds easily in the 40 mph range if not higher, it’s going to be a very ugly, potentially life-threatening situation.”

Livestock could be affected, so ranchers in the region should take precautions to protect their cattle.

The storm is a fast-mover and is expected to leave the region by midday Tuesday. But temperatures will stay in the 20s and 30s so the snow won’t melt quickly, and a weaker storm that could move into New Mexico Tuesday will likely follow the same general track.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/weather/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20111218/ap_on_re_us/us_winter_weather

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) ? An “epic” storm was bearing down on western Alaska on Tuesday, the National Weather Service said, warning that it could be one of the worst on record for the state.

The storm, moving inland from the Aleutian Islands, was expected to bring hurricane-force winds with gusts up to 100 miles per hour, heavy snowfall, widespread coastal flooding and severe erosion to most of Alaska’s west coast, the National Weather Service said.

“This will be an extremely dangerous and life threatening storm of an epic magnitude rarely experienced,” the service said in a special warning message.

Nome and the rest of the Seward Peninsula, a section of land that juts out toward Siberia, were expected to be the hardest-hit areas, said Andy Brown, lead forecaster for the National Weather Service in Anchorage.

Powerful storms in the North Pacific and Bering Sea are common this time of year, but this event is unusual because of its trajectory, Brown said.

“It’s going very far north,” he said.

Officials in Nome issued an evacuation order late on Tuesday for people living along Front Street, a beachside avenue that serves as the finish line for the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, and for other low-lying areas in town.

At least three other communities were housing residents in local shelters as of Tuesday afternoon, said Brian Fischer, chief of operations for the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

But long-distance evacuations from the remote region were not considered feasible, Fischer told a media briefing in Anchorage.

NATIVE VILLAGES IN HARM’S WAY

“Air traffic will not be flying in the weather that we’re expecting in the next 24 to 48 hours,” he said.

Posing an additional threat is the lack of sea ice off northwestern Alaska, forecasters said.

The last time a storm of a similar magnitude was sent in the same northward direction was 1974, but the sea surface was much more frozen then, Brown said.

“History tells that the sea ice helps subdue the storm surge,” Brown said. “With no sea ice there, we could see the full brunt of that 6- to 9-foot storm surge.”

Arctic sea ice this year reached the second-lowest coverage since satellite records began in 1979, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

“Forty years ago, a big storm like this would come through and the sea ice would act as sort of a buffer,” said Mark Serreze, director of the Snow and Ice Data Center.

“The Bering Sea has and always will have these strong storms. What is different now is their potential destructiveness as you lose the sea ice cover,” he added.

Federal, state and local agencies were making emergency preparations in advance of the storm. The state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management set up an incident command, with numerous agencies coordinating responses.

The U.S. Coast Guard said it has staged helicopters in the region and sent a cutter to prepare for emergency responses, with a special focus on the crab-fishing fleet.

Numerous government agencies have set up an incident command, said Jeremy Zidek, a spokesman for the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

Nome, with 3,600 residents, is one of the largest cities in western Alaska. The communities spread along the coastline are mostly traditional Native settlements, with a few hundred to a few thousand inhabitants, and no roads linking communities.

Although the region is sparsely populated, the storm presents significant dangers, Alaska Senator Mark Begich said in a written statement.

“I realize we are in a remote part of the country, but many people and communities are in harm’s way,” Begich said.

(Editing by Dan Whitcomb, Peter Bohan and Cynthia Johnston)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/weather/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20111109/us_nm/us_storm_alaska

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INDIANAPOLIS ? The summer evening at the Indiana State Fair turned strangely cold. The wind blew hard, then harder still, tearing the fabric from the roof of the wobbling grandstand stage.

The crowd, waiting under a thunderous sky for the country duo Sugarland to perform Saturday, had just been told over the loudspeakers that severe weather was possible. They were told where to seek shelter if an evacuation was necessary, but none was ordered. The show, it seemed, was to go on.

None of the phone calls workers had made to the National Weather Service prepared them for the 60 to 70 mph gust that blew a punishing cloud of dirt, dust and rain down the fairground’s main thoroughfare. The massive rigging and lighting system covering the stage tilted forward, then plummeted onto the front of the crowd in a sickening thump.

Five people were killed, four of them at the scene, where dozens ran forward to help the injured while others ran for shelter out of fear that the devastation had only begun. Dozens of people ? including several children ? remained hospitalized Sunday, some with life-threatening injuries.

“Women were crying. Children were crying. Men were crying,” fairgoer Mike Zent said.

The fair canceled all activities Sunday as officials began the long process of determining what happened and fielded difficult questions about whether the tragedy could have been prevented.

“We’re all very much in mourning,” Cindy Hoye, the fair’s executive director, said during a news conference Sunday. “It’s a very sad day at the state fair.”

Gov. Mitch Daniels called the accident an “unthinkable tragedy” and said the wind burst was a “fluke” that no one could have foreseen. Dan McCarthy, chief meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Indiana, said the burst of wind was far stronger than gusts in other areas of the fairgrounds.

The seemingly capricious nature of the gust was evident Sunday at the fair, where crews placed a blue drape around the grandstand to block the view of the wreckage. A striped tent nearby appeared unscathed, as did an aluminum trailer about 50 yards away. The Ferris wheel on the midway also escaped damage.

First Sgt. Dave Bursten of the Indiana State Police said the lack of damage to structures on the fair’s midway or elsewhere supported the weather service’s belief that an isolated, significant wind gust caused the rigging to topple.

“All of us know without exception in Indiana the weather can change from one report to another report, and that was the case here,” he said.

The stage toppled at 8:49 p.m. A timeline released by Indiana State Police shows that fair staff contacted the weather service four times between 5:30 and 8 p.m. At 8 p.m., the weather service said a storm with hail and 40 mph winds was expected to hit the fairgrounds at 9:15 p.m.

Bursten said fair officials had begun preparing in case they needed to evacuate visitors for the impending storm. At 8:30, additional state troopers moved to the grandstand to help in the event of an evacuation, according to the timeline.

Meteorologist John Hendrickson said it’s not unusual for strong winds to precede a thunderstorm, and that Saturday’s gust might have been channeled through the stage area by buildings on either side of the dirt track where the stage fell, at the bottom of the grandstand.

Fair officials said the Indiana Occupational Health and Safety Administration and state fire marshal’s office were investigating. Bursten said the investigation could take months.

The owner of Mid-America Sound Corp., which installed the rigging, expressed sympathy for the families of those killed or injured. Kerry Darrenkamp also said the Greenfield, Ind.-based company had begun “an independent internal investigation to understand, to the best of our ability, what happened.”

Zent, of Los Angeles, said the storm instantly transformed what had been a hot, sunny day.

“Just everything turned black. … It was really cold, it was like winter, because I had been sweating all day. Wind blew over the ATM machine,” Zent said.

He and his girlfriend, Jess Bates, were behind the grandstand when the heard a noise ? the stage collapse. They began running as the wind buffeted them.

Bates said a woman who had been in the second row of the concert with her teenage daughter grabbed her and sobbed as she recounted pulling her daughter to safety while others rushed forward to try to help those pinned beneath the scaffolding.

“She was gripping me very tight, and I could just feel her shaking,” Bates said. “She said, `My daughter is all I have in this world and I almost lost her tonight,’” Bates said.

Dr. Dean Silas, a gastroenterologist from Deerfield, Ill., said it took about five minutes to work his way from the grandstands to the track after the collapse. He saw three bodies covered with plastic when he arrived.

He said it took about 25 minutes for volunteers and emergency workers to remove victims from beneath the rigging and load them onto makeshift stretchers.

“There had to be 75 to 100 people there helping out,” he said.

Bursten identified those killed as Alina Bigjohny, 23, of Fort Wayne; Christina Santiago, 29, of Chicago; Tammy Vandam, 42, of Wanatah; and two Indianapolis residents: 49-year-old Glenn Goodrich and 51-year-old Nathan Byrd. Byrd, a stagehand who was atop the rigging when it fell, died overnight.

Jennifer Nettles of Sugarland sent a statement to The Associated Press through her marketing manager, saying she watched video of the collapse on the news “in horror.”

“I am so moved,” she said. “Moved by the grief of those families who lost loved ones. Moved by the pain of those who were injured and the fear of their families. Moved by the great heroism as I watched so many brave Indianapolis fans actually run toward the stage to try and help lift and rescue those injured. Moved by the quickness and organization of the emergency workers who set up the triage and tended to the injured.”

Jason Owen, who manages marketing, press and creative for the band, said Sugarland was in a prayer circle before their performance. The band members were held off stage by the tour manager because of the weather before the stage collapsed.

Sugarland ? Nettles and Kristian Bush ? canceled their Sunday show at the Iowa State Fair.

Concert-goers and other witnesses said an announcer warned them of impending bad weather but gave conflicting accounts of whether emergency sirens at the fair sounded. Some fair workers said they never heard any warnings.

“It’s pathetic. It makes me mad,” said groundskeeper Roger Smith. “Those lives could have been saved yesterday.”

Fair spokesman Andy Klotz said the damage was so sudden and isolated that he wasn’t sure sirens would have done any good.

Indiana is prone to volatile changes in weather. In April 2006, tornado-force winds hit Indianapolis just after thousands of people left a free outdoor concert by John Mellencamp held as part of the NCAA men’s Final Four basketball tournament. And in May 2004, a tornado touched down south of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, delaying the start of the Indianapolis 500 and forcing a nearly two-hour interruption in the race.

Daniels stood by the fair and its officials as they prepared to reopen Monday with a public memorial service to honor the victims.

“This is the finest event of its kind in America, this is the finest one we’ve ever had, and this desperately sad … fluke event doesn’t change that,” he said.

Sunday’s accident was the worst at the Indiana fairgrounds since a 1963 explosion at the fairgrounds coliseum killed 74 people attending an ice skating show.

___

Associated Press writers Cliff Brunt and Ken Kusmer in Indianapolis, Caitlin R. King in Nashville, Tenn., Michelle Johnson in Chicago and AP photographer Darron Cummings contributed to this report.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/topstories/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110815/ap_on_re_us/us_indiana_fair_stage_collapse

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