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gerous cold that could break decades-old records with wind chill warnings stretching from Montana to Alabama.
• For a big chunk of the Midwest, the subzero temperatures were moving in behind another winter wallop: more than a foot of snow and high winds that made traveling treacherous. Officials closed schools in cities including Chicago, St. Louis and Milwaukee and warned residents to stay indoors and avoid the frigid cold altogether.
• The forecast is extreme: 32 below zero in Fargo, N.D.; minus 21 in Madison, Wis.; and 15 below zero in Minneapolis, Indianapolis and Chicago. Wind chills -- what it feels like outside when high winds are factored into the temperature -- could drop into the minus 50s and 60s.
• "It's just a dangerous cold," said National Weather Service meteorologist Butch Dye in Missouri.
• It hasn't been this cold for almost two decades in many parts of the country. Frostbite and hypothermia can set in quickly at 15 to 30 below zero.
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Gone with the wind chill: Icy gusts spread winter pain across US, make frigid temps unbearable
• MINNEAPOLIS (AP) -- It's not the heat, it's the humidity, goes the old saying. For the tens of millions of Americans currently trapped in the deep freeze: It's not the cold, it's the wind.
• Air temperatures plunging into the negative teens, twenties and even thirties Sunday into Monday are bad enough. But add wind speeds of even a few miles per hour, and what's already deeply unpleasant becomes downright dangerous.
• "It's not so much the absolute cold, though that's certainly not pleasant either," said Mark Seeley, a climatologist for the University of Minnesota. "But what the wind does when it starts blowing it around is force the cold air onto whatever it touches. Whether it's human skin or a car engine, the wind pushes away the warmth being generated and replaces it with cold."
• Thus the popular term "wind chill," which a couple of Polar explorers originated in 1945 to differentiate between the actual temperature, and the temperature that it feels like thanks to the wind. For instance: In International Falls, Minn., along the Canadian border, it was forecast to reach an air temperature of 30 below zero early Monday. But wind gusts will make it feel more like negative 60.
• "Fighting a fire on a night like that, a lot of our guys would rather do recon in the burning structure than man the hoses," said Jim Hultman, a veteran firefighter in In (Continued on page 18)
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