Freezing air blanketed much of the nation Tuesday, making roads hazardous in Texas and slowing recovery from ice storm blackouts in New England, in the second day of a bitter cold wave.
Temperatures were 20 below zero and lower across the northern Plains, and a band of snow, freezing rain and sleet stretched from Kansas along the Ohio Valley to Maine.
Dozens of schools closed in Kentucky and Tennessee because of slippery roads and salt truck crews started working before dawn. Up to a half-foot of snow had fallen in parts of Kentucky.
"It's pretty treacherous," said Jodi Shacklette, a Kentucky State Police dispatcher in Elizabethtown. "We're working wrecks just left and right."
