Heavy lake-effect snow hits Great Lakes states

CONSTABLEVILLE, N.Y. (AP) -- A blast of cold wind spread snow along the Great Lakes from Michigan to New York on Monday, dumping 2 feet on this central New York town.

Snow doesn't usually fall this early in Constableville, librarian Dorothy Valenti said.

"Yesterday morning we had none. So it's quite a transition to go from no snow to all this. When you open the door, it's amazing," she said in a telephone interview. "It's strange to have a snow day before Thanksgiving."

Moisture from the lakes produced lake-effect snow on the eastern and southern shores of the lakes.

The deepest was in this snow-prone section of New York, where the National Weather Service said 24 inches had fallen at Constableville, at the east end of Lake Ontario on the Tug Hill Plateau. In western New York, moisture from Lake Erie had turned into 23 inches of snow by midmorning at Ellicottville, south of Buffalo.

In northwest Pennsylvania, Erie reported as much as 14 inches of snow Monday morning and several schools districts in the region closed or delayed classes. And more than a foot had fallen Monday in parts of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, including 19 inches near Trenary, the weather service said.

Police reported numerous accidents on slippery roads in Pennsylvania, Ohio and New York. A section of northbound U.S. 131 in Michigan's Allegan County had to be shut down because two tractor-trailer rigs slid off the pavement and overturned.

Up to a foot of snow was forecast by Tuesday in northern Indiana, with 10 inches possible in Ohio's Cleveland area, the weather service said. Motorists in northern Indiana were warned that visibility along Interstate 94 and the Indiana Toll Road could drop to near zero at times.

The weather system producing the snow was moving toward the southeast, and the weather service posted a winter storm warning for Tuesday in the mountains of West Virginia and Maryland's Panhandle, saying a foot of snow is possible in places.

It wasn't the first snowstorm this season in the Northeast. In late October, a storm spread just over a foot of snow over parts of northern New Jersey, northeast Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains and New York's Catskill Mountains, and heavy snow also fell at higher elevations of northern New England.

(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)