President Barack Obama on Wednesday scoffed at Washington DC's tendency to panic over a few snowflakes and expressed disbelief classes at his daughters' school were cancelled over “some ice.” The president said his new city needed to acquire some “toughness” from his hometown Chicago, where winters are long, deep, and bitter cold. “Can I make a comment that is unrelated to the economy very quickly? And it has to do with Washington,” Obama told reporters ushered in to hear him talk to a group of chief executive officers about his stimulus package. “My children's school was canceled today. Because of what? Some ice?” Obama said in mock outrage, sparking laughter from his guests. “As my children pointed out, in Chicago school is never canceled, in fact my 7-year-old pointed out that you'd go outside for recess. “You wouldn't even stay indoors. We're going to have to try to apply some flinty Chicago toughness to this. “I'm saying, when it comes to the weather, folks in Washington don't seem to be able to handle things.” Schools in and around Washington and its suburbs were closed on Wednesday after a day and night of snow and freezing rain coated roads and sidewalks in a glossy and treacherous sheen of ice. People in Washington have even been known to strip supermarket shelves of staples like bread and milk when winter storms approach, breathlessly tracked by local television weather anchors. Children stay at home, often during much more favorable conditions than those through which kids in big snowfall cities like Boston, Buffalo, Minneapolis and Chicago struggle for months in the wintertime. In Little Arkansas, tree limbs snapped with a sound like gunshots, blacking out thousands of homes and businesses, and schools and government offices were closed as a major storm spread a glaze of ice and snow from the southern US Plains to the East Coast. At least 19 deaths had been blamed on the weather. Highway crews fought to keep up with slippery roads and in some places were blocked by fallen tree limbs and power lines. Ice had built up 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) thick in sections of Arkansas and Oklahoma. The National Weather Service posted ice storm and winter storm warnings Tuesday along a broad swath from Texas and Oklahoma through the Mississippi and Ohio valleys all the way into northern New England. Radar showed smears of snow and freezing rain stretching from Texas to Pennsylvania during the evening. Broken tree limbs weighted down by ice crashed onto power lines, cutting service to at least 165,000 homes and businesses in hard-hit Arkansas, utilities said. Arkansas utilities warned customers that their power could be out for at least three days. “Trees are falling everywhere you look. It's amazing. I saw power lines broken in half,” said Nancy Stears, 37, of Midway, Arkansas, in a Taco Bell restaurant that had briefly managed to stay open despite the ice. Kentucky state officials reported more than 104,000 customers with no electricity as ice up to 1.5 inches (3.8 centimeters) thick broke tree limbs. “You hear the popping - it sounded like gunfire - and it's limbs from trees breaking,” said Hopkins County, Kentucky, Judge-Executive Donald Carroll who was among those with no power. He said crews in his western Kentucky county were busy trying to clear broken branches from roads. Emergency shelters were set up in several western Kentucky communities.
