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CHICAGO (Reuter) - Clear, cold weather met millions of Thanksgiving holiday travelers across much of the United States on one of the busiest travel days of the year.
But forecasters on Wednesday warned that a storm developing in the Southwest could make their trip home a mess by Sunday in parts of the Midwest and East, with snow and ice.
Winter-like cold, nearly a month before the official start of the season, put a big chunk of the northern Midwest in a deep freeze, delaying a much-needed thaw for areas trying to recover from a deadly ice storm earlier in the week.
Anout two-dozen deaths have been blamed on that storm and other weather problems. The toll included two children who died in the Chicago area in a fire blamed on a space heater and a southeast Indiana couple who died when their car was swept into a swollen creek during a flash flood.
Airports across the country were jammed but reported few weather-related troubles. An exception was Boston's Logan Airport which reported delays of up to two hours and flight cancellations after an early morning snow accompanied by high winds forced the facility to use only one of its three runways.
"There are extensive delays and we're down to using only one runway when we really would need to use three runways on a day like this," said Tim Kinon, of MassPort which operates the facility.
Dave Taylor, a forecaster for Weather Services Inc., said most of the country was clear except for rain in the Pacific Northwest, a developing storm over New Mexico and Colorado and snow in areas of the Great Lakes and some coastal spots in the East.
It was 11 below zero Fahrenheit Wednesday morning at Aberdeen, S.D., one of the coldest spots in the lower 48 states. Readings from zero to 10 below were common across the Dakotas and into the western Great Lakes region.
Taylor said a "major storm" will be developing over Texas Friday or early Saturday, and its preliminary projected track through the Ohio Valley could cause travel troubles Sunday.
"It could be fairly messy," he said, though the exact path the storm will take remains to be seen. The Sunday after Thanksgiving Day is the busiest travel day of the year in the United States as people who left home over the course of several days leading up to the observance attempt to return at once.
By one estimate more than 30 million people will travel at least 100 miles for the holiday observance. About 2 million passengers will pass through Chicago's two airports during the Thanksgiving period.
In southwestern Minnesota the continuing cold hampered utility workers trying to restore electrical power to hundreds of people still blacked out from the ice storm earlier in the week.
Ice-related power outages continued to plague parts of South Dakota and Oklahoma as well central Missouri where some schools were closed for a third day in a row.