After icing parts of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, a winter storm arrived Wednesday in Georgia, dropping a mix of ice and rain that was expected to continue pelting the Southeast into Thursday.
Up to three-quarters of an inch of ice was expected to accumulate on Atlanta and up to 10 inches of snow and sleet on Charlotte, North Carolina, making travel treacherous.
Area residents had heeded ample warnings issued by forecasters, emptying grocery store shelves, filling up their tanks with gas and filling their trunks with salt. In Atlanta, the city that couldn't get out of its own way after a 2.6-inch snowfall two weeks ago, road crews were staged along nearly empty highways.
The low is expected to move up the East Coast, dropping snow on the Northeast, with 4 to 8 inches predicted for Washington and 6 to 10 inches on New York from midnight Wednesday into the day Thursday.
National Weather Service forecasters say the storm -- packed with sleet, snow, rain and ice -- is a potentially "catastrophic event."
"This is one of Mother Nature's worst kinds of storms that can be inflicted on the South," Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal told reporters Tuesday afternoon. "That is ice. It is our biggest enemy."
In Georgia, more than 400 members of the National Guard were deployed for weather duty, and about 100 each for the Carolinas and Alabama.
Sleet and freezing rain began falling across Georgia early Wednesday, causing scattered power outages -- almost 74,000, with the majority of them in the metro Atlanta area, according to a tally from power companies.
More than 18,000 were without power in South Carolina, and another 900 had no electricity in Alabama. The power companies said Wednesday morning they expect those numbers to rise over the next 24 hours.
Georgia Power, the state's largest utility, warned that hundreds of thousands of customers could be without electricity "for days."
"This has the opportunity to be a huge event when you're talking about the amount of ice you're looking at," Aaron Strickland, the emergency operations chief for the power company, told reporters.
The utility staged fleets of trucks across the area. Teams from Florida, Texas and Ohio bolstered local line crews.
It's not the snow, it's the ice
More wicked weather coming
Twenty-two states -- from Louisiana to Maine -- are under winter advisories.
"Widespread and extended power outages are likely as ice accumulates on trees and power lines and brings them down," the warning says. "Please prepare to be without power in some locations for days and perhaps as long as a week."
In the Appalachians, more than 8 inches of snow were predicted to fall Wednesday.
Accumulations of 3 to 5 inches are expected in metropolitan Atlanta, and more in its northern suburbs.
Northeast Georgia and upstate South Carolina could get more.
Residents of Charlotte, North Carolina, were looking at up to a foot of snow, while mountainous southwestern Virginia could see up to 14 inches.
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