In northern Arkansas, a school bus crashed Wednesday on a steep, snowy country road, leaving three students and the driver with minor injuries. Pope County Sheriff Aaron Duval said the bus slid off a road on Crow Mountain, nearly flipping before it was stopped by trees at the roadside.
The weather service warned that freezing rain could lead to a half-inch or more of ice accumulating Thursday in central and northern Arkansas, making travelling particularly dangerous.
Officials said the storm could be the Midwest's worst since a two-day storm that began Feb. 1, 2011. That storm was blamed for about two dozen deaths and left hundreds of thousands without power, some for several days. At its peak, the storm created white-out conditions so intense that Interstate 70 was shut down across the entire state of Missouri.
Tim Chojnacki, spokesman for the Missouri Department of Transportation, said it planned to have salt trucks on the roads before the storm arrived in the Show-Me State in hopes that the precipitation would largely melt upon impact.
Much of Kansas was expected to get up to a foot of snow, which many rural residents welcomed after nearly a year of drought.
Jerry and Diane McReynolds spent part of Wednesday putting out more hay and straw for newborn calves at their farm near Woodston in north central Kansas. The storm made extra work, but Diane McReynolds said it would help their winter wheat, pastures and dried-up ponds.
"In the city you hear they don't want the snow and that sort of thing, and I am thinking, 'Yes, we do,' and they don't realize that we need it," she said. "We have to have it or their food cost in the grocery store is going to go very high. We have to have this. We pray a lot for it."
