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celed the event early Friday afternoon.
• Bundled up against the elements, Matthew Johnson was one of the few people braving the cold Friday.
• "We're going to walk the dog and have fun outside, I guess," said Johnson, standing near his home in the Dallas suburb of Richardson.
• Agencies and residents here are still haunted by the fiasco of a frozen Super Bowl week two years ago, when an inadequate response to a winter storm crippled the region and left visitors stranded on impassable highways.
• This time, all of North Texas mobilized before an expected half-inch of freezing rain began to come down. Temperatures are forecast to stay below freezing after the rain passes, meaning residents will have to contend with icy roads through the weekend.
• One Home Depot in Dallas was running out of firewood and ice melt a day early.
• "It's almost like a Black Friday," said store manager James McGilberry, "but I guess we'll call it an Ice Friday."
• Road crews were continuously dumping sand on largely empty highways, and utility company Oncor reported 250,000 customers were without power in the Dallas area, where temperatures had fallen into the 20s and some places saw light snow.
• The weather forced more than 1,000 cancelations at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, one of the nation's busiest airports and a key hub for Fort Worth-based American Airlines. Many travelers were stuck waiting and hoping for another flight to take them to their destination. Those arriving in North Texas were having trouble finding cabs as many drivers stayed home. Dallas-area light rail trains were not running.
• "I don't let things like this stop me," said Dayo Bankale, a taxi driver at the airport Friday. "I'm not scared."
• Rosibel Gutierrez Artavia, shivering in a light sweater as she waited for a taxi, had traveled from Alajuela, Costa Rica, to suburban Fort Worth to see family. Relatives called her before she left Costa Rica to warn her to pack warm. But she got the call when she was already at the airport.
• "I did not come prepared with snow clothes," Artavia said in Spanish.
• But she was still thankful that the weather didn't prevent her from boarding a flight that got her from Houston to North Texas and close to her family.
• "I prayed to God and He listened to me," she said.
• The National Weather Service issued winter storm and ice warnings through much of Friday for parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and Tennessee. Some parts of the Midwest expected to see several

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