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Ice storm smacks roads, power lines

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (AP) -- Residents from Texas to Illinois on Saturday braced for yet another wave of a deadly storm that had already coated the region with a layer of freezing rain and sleet, as frigid arctic blasts reached as far as Southern California.
More than 125,000 homes and businesses had no electricity Saturday in the St. Louis area, where the storm dumped a mix of snow and ice the day before.
"We are still in the middle of a storm," said Ern DeCamp, spokesman for Springfield's City Utilities, where 50,000 customers were without power. "We're still losing people."
The storm had been blamed for at least six deaths across the region and led to some school closures and flight cancellations at Lambert-St. Louis International Airport and Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

The latest death reported was a 26-year-old woman killed Saturday in Oklahoma when the car she was riding in swerved off Interstate 40 and slammed into a sand truck that was clearing ice from the shoulder.
In Oklahoma, where the storm had dropped more than a half-an-inch of sleet, some 24,000 homes and businesses were without power Saturday. Most of the outages were in the southwestern and south central parts of the state.
"We're still keeping our fingers crossed. We haven't had the outages that we expected so far," said Albert Ashwood director of the Oklahoma Department of Emergency Management.
At least two more waves of freezing rain, ice and snow are expected during the weekend, he said.
"We're very concerned about those," Ashwood said
The storm was moving into Illinois, where the National Weather Service issued an ice storm warning Saturday for the central part of the state through Monday morning.
Freezing rain could layer the region with up to half an inch of ice, forecasters said.
Sun-loving Southern Californians also got a rare dose of freezing weather, prompting worry about the homeless and crops. From Palmdale to Fresno, temperatures ranged from the single digits to the low 30s, although much of Los Angeles County stayed in the low 40s.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued an emergency proclamation Friday citing "conditions of extreme peril to the safety of persons and property ... as a result of extreme low temperatures and freezing conditions."