Crazy quilt of weather snarls holiday travel

A powerful storm system spawned rare December tornadoes in the South, dropped crippling ice and snow in the Midwest and brought unseasonably warm temperatures from the mid-Atlantic to New York City. Meteorologist Mike Seidel reports.

By M. Alex Johnson and F. Brinley Bruton, NBC News

Freezing rain, snow and ice swirling in and around unseasonably warm patches created a bizarre patchwork of weather conditions over dozens of states Sunday, wreaking havoc for millions of holiday travelers.

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The massive storm, covering at least 35 states, carried a little bit of everything:

• Heavy snow from Oklahoma to Wisconsin — as much as 10 inches predicted through Sunday.


• Flash flood watches across 11 states from Texas to New York.


• Ice storm warnings in parts of northern New England. 


• Record highs in other parts of the Northeast.


• Possible tornadoes, with the highest risk Monday from Texas to Tennessee.

“What really worries me tornado-wise about this situation is one, people don’t usually expect tornadoes in December,” said Greg Forbes of The Weather Channel. “Two, they are going to be in some cases farther north than people expect.”

The Midwest, meanwhile, was digging out from another major snow dump. Parts of Iowa had recorded 6 inches by 5 p.m. ET Sunday, and dangerously cold air was moving in behind it to lock in ice hazards.

With wind chills expected as low as minus-25 in some counties overnight, Alex Mihalakis and his 6 year-old-son, Jace, were out helping clear off sidewalks, cars and driveways in Dubuque for people who weren’t able to get out.

“We can’t buy anybody anything, so we decided to help them out with this snowfall,” Mihalakis told NBC station KWWL of Waterloo.

Jeffrey Phelps / AP

A police officer tags a car that spun out Sunday along Highway 172 in Green Bay, Wis. A winter storm was wreaking havoc across several states over the weekend.

“We’ve had pretty poor weather conditions two weeks in a row leading up to Christmas,” said Christopher Dolce, a meteorologist for The Weather Channel. “There’s been a considerable amount of winter storm activity all the way back to the days before Thanksgiving and a lot of travel woes continuing into December.”

About 665 flights had been canceled and 5,750 more had been delayed across the country at 9:30 p.m. ET Sunday, according to the aviation tracking website FlightAware.com.

Many were in or out of major hubs like Houston’s Bush International, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver International and Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, where 136 flights had been canceled.

Get the latest weather news and your local forecast

The weather was suspected in at least eight deaths, including that of a driver who was killed Saturday afternoon on an icy road near Kansas City, Mo., police said, and two people in Mississippi who were killed as a result of gusty winds.

Five people also drowned in Kentucky, NBC station WLWT of Cincinnati reported — three in one vehicle in Bardstown, which became submerged in the Rolling Fork River, and another man in Carroll County, whose vehicle tipped over on top of him after getting stuck in a creek. A fifth body was recovered from an abandoned vehicle in a flooded ditch in Ballard County.

The large storm system surged into the Midwest on Friday. On Saturday night, a line of thunderstorms stretched from southern Louisiana to Indiana, and at least two suspected tornadoes hit Arkansas, injuring at least five people.

A man in Rena Lara, Miss., was killed Saturday when wind flipped his mobile home.

And another person died Saturday when the car he was driving struck a fallen tree in the road in Jasper County, Miss. A woman in the car was critically injured and taken to the hospital.

Meanwhile, a major ice storm was barreling toward New York State and northern New England, knocking out power to thousands of customers. About 52,000 customers in upstate New York and 315,000 in Michigan were affected, utility officials said.

But balmy, warm weather was also moving ahead of the front, with other parts of the East Coast seeing highs in the 70s along with high humidity. New York City’s Central Park hit a record 65 degrees Saturday.

The system created wildly swinging weather patterns almost county to county. In Bennington, Vt., the high reached 63 degrees Sunday, compared to 37 in Albany, N.Y. — only 40 miles west.

John Yang and Erik Ortiz of NBC News contributed to this report.

Related:

• ‘Holiday travel nightmare’: Winter storm, tornadoes could spell Christmas misery


• Snow, sleet and commuter chaos as winter storm pounds Northeast

This story was originally published on Sun Dec 22, 2013 1:40 PM EST

Crazy quilt of weather snarls holiday travel

Obamacare launch hits early hitch as online traffic snarls up sites

A member of the U.S. House of Representatives walks down the steps from the House Chamber as he exits the U.S. Capitol after the Republican-led House again voted to link funding for the U.S. government to include a delay of ”Obamacare” in Washington, September 30, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Jim Bourg

By David Morgan

WASHINGTON | Tue Oct 1, 2013 1:01am EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Millions of Americans will learn on Tuesday what President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare law actually means for them, as the administration opens new insurance marketplaces in 50 states despite the government shutdown.

The launch marks a milestone for Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement, which aims to provide subsidized healthcare to millions of the uninsured, the most ambitious U.S. social program since Medicare was introduced in the 1960s.

The marketplaces, or exchanges, require health plans to provide a broad range of essential benefits that were not necessarily part of individual policies in the past, including mental health services, birth control and preventive care. The coverage is linked to other insurance market reforms and new consumer safeguards including a ban on discrimination based on gender and health history.

It also mandates that Americans obtain insurance or pay a fine.

“Nothing like this has ever existed before,” said U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Republicans have fought for months to delay or stop Obamacare, most recently triggering a shutdown of the federal government on Monday night by insisting that a routine funding measure include a delay in Obamacare, which the Democratic-controlled Senate rejected.

Officials running the new exchanges braced for technical glitches that could hamper the enrollment effort.

But the president said that whatever the outcome of talks in Congress, the healthcare reform launch would proceed.

“The Affordable Care Act is moving forward. That funding is already in place. You can’t shut it down,” Obama resolutely informed his Republican opponents in a televised statement at the White House on Monday.

As many as 7 million Americans are expected to sign up for insurance in 2014 through the exchanges, which open for enrollment into new insurance plans on Tuesday and will accept applications through March 31. An additional 8 million people are expected to receive health benefits through an expansion of the government’s Medicaid program for the poor.

Republicans have blamed Obamacare’s requirements for pushing up the cost of health insurance for business and individuals, a claim the Democrats deny.

“What I want is to keep the government running and at the same time to deal with the harms, the millions of Americans who are … at risk of losing their healthcare, are facing skyrocketing insurance premiums,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who has been leading the charge among Republicans in Congress to defund the law, said in an interview with CNN.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act has been the object of intensive Republican attack since it was signed into law in 2010. Its foes tried and failed to use the U.S. Supreme Court and a presidential election to get it overturned in 2012.

SLOW START

In the early planning, the administration aimed to create new healthcare markets that would make shopping for insurance as simple as buying an airline ticket online. But repeated delays and technical difficulties mean the new sites in many states won’t have all of their functions ready in the first weeks, at the earliest.

Minnesota officials said on Monday that they were not yet sure what time their state’s exchange would launch, and that the timing would only be determined after further testing on Tuesday morning to see if the system connected properly with federal government’s network for determining subsidies.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which will operate federal marketplaces in 36 states that are not running their own, has also said that technical glitches are likely.

“We will fix them and move on. Is it a sign that the law is flawed and failed? I don’t think so. I think it’s a sign that we’re building a piece of complicated technology,” Sebelius said.

Senior administration officials and organizers working to help reach the uninsured with news of Obamacare benefits believe enrollment will get off to a quiet start on Tuesday and build slowly through the six-month enrollment period.

The first enrollees are likely to be people with pre-existing health conditions and older people who have had a hard time obtaining coverage up to now. But Obamacare’s success will depend on young healthy adults, whose lower risk profile is needed to compensate for higher cost beneficiaries.

However, the law remains unpopular with 46 percent of the public. Anti-Obamacare forces have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in television advertising, outspending Obamacare supporters by more than four-to-one. Meanwhile, millions of potential beneficiaries don’t know the law exists.

Officials said Tuesday would also see a ramp-up in the administration’s multimillion-dollar media campaign to reach prospective beneficiaries through television, Twitter, Facebook and social organizations including churches.

In particular, they are targeting young and healthy Americans whose participation will help offset the cost of covering sicker beneficiaries. The advertising campaign is targeting black and Hispanic men between the ages of 18 and 35 in large cities in Florida, Texas, Illinois and California.

“People are just starting to tune in,” Sebelius said. “As we ramp up our communications and connect it with real facts, for the first time, a lot of Americans will be learning what the law means for them.”

(Additional reporting by Lewis Krauskopf and Sharon Begley in New York; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Lisa Shumaker)

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Reuters: Politics

Obamacare launch hits early hitch as online traffic snarls up sites