Winter Horrorland : Hundreds of accidents in several states,dozens of pileups and major traffic jams. Thousands of flights were also canceled.

NBC News

South blows the dust off snowplows for rare winter storm

Police and emergency crews have responded to hundreds of accidents in several states that stranded cars along the road and caused dozens of pileups and major traffic jams. Thousands of flights were also canceled. NBC's Dylan Dreyer reports.

By Gabe Gutierrez, Erin McClam and M. Alex Johnson, NBC News

Up north, snowplows are armadas — hundreds of them that fan out over and over to clear the streets during the punishing storms of winter. If they're handled carelessly, as more than one mayor of New York has learned, there's political hell to pay.
Not so for Columbia, S.C., which has a grand total of nine.
"They usually hang in the shed," said Robert Sweatt, the city's superintendent of street maintenance. "When we need them, we pull them out."
On Tuesday, the city was ready to give them a workout for the first time in at least three years. A rare winter storm stretched from Texas to Virginia, grounding thousands of flights and making a snowy, icy mess of roads.

Traffic came to a complete stop in the Atlanta area, where a traffic officer delivered a baby late Tuesday afternoon in the back seat of the car for a couple who were stranded in icy conditions on Interstate 285 in the suburb of Sandy Springs. A spokesman for the Sandy Springs police said mom and baby, who weren't identified, were doing fine.

The Arctic weather system is expected to move north, producing a shift in current weather patterns. NBC's Al Roker reports.

Classes were canceled from Texas to the Carolinas, while some school districts that did open told parents it would be safer to simply let their kids stay at school overnight.
"Students who are at school will remain until our roads are safer," Cherokee County, Ga., school officials told parents Tuesday afternoon, adding that they were "prepared to shelter students as necessary."
Hardware stores across the South, meanwhile, were wiped clean of shovels and rock salt.
"Yesterday was the big grocery panic day," said Andy Smith, who runs the Nickelodeon, a nonprofit theater in Columbia. He decided to cancel showings of "Inside Llewyn Davis" and close his doors Tuesday and Wednesday.
He said his friends were divided evenly between people joking about overreaction and people "actually freaking out a little bit."

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