A winter storm has hit the Northeast after sweeping through the Midwest, spreading a wintry mix of snow, sleet and freezing rain. This in turn caused slow commutes and paralyzed transportation services and shut down state and office buildings across the regions.
O’Hare International Airport in Chicago cancelled 300 flights today and 1,000 flights yesterday after reporting over 9 inches of snowfall, reported The Chicago Tribune.
A spokesperson from United Parcel Services (UPS) told Fleet Owner that its ground fleet is operating under severe winter weather conditions in Detroit, MI and Iowa. UPS does not anticipate any major delays in its ground operations, though package deliveries may be late a couple hours, the spokesperson said.
Travis Spalding, a UPS spokesperson based in Louisville, KY, told Fleet Owner that some air deliveries were rerouted as contingency plans. “There hasn’t been any major problem,” he said. “Our regional gateway in Rockford, IL received some of the flights slated for our Louisville hub,” which is the company’s largest air gateway.
“If weather affects one gateway we reshuffle some planes and that gives us time to work around the weather,” Spalding added.
No major highway closures were announced so far.
More storms coming to the West Coast
According to Weather.com the West Coast will be hit with two storms simultaneously on Friday, giving the region little time to recover from a week-long stint of precipitation in Southern California that had shut down a 40-mile stretch of I-5 for over a day on Monday.
See I-5 in California reopens but storm continues.
The two storm fronts will come from Canada into the Pacific Northwest and from the Pacific into California, Weather.com said. The weather systems have prompted flood warnings in lower elevations of Southern California, and snow advisories in Seattle.