A huge storm spread a smear of ice and snow from the Rockies to the Northeast yesterday, snarling highway and airline traffic, causing the mercury to plummet in the Midwest and snapping power lines serving thousands of homes and businesses.

The snow, sleet, and freezing rain were part of a mass of cold air that dropped the temperature to a January 5 record low of 39 below zero in North Dakota’s Grand Forks. Embarrass, Minn., hit 43 below, the National Weather Service said.

School closings were reported from New Mexico to New Jersey, and hundreds of travelers were stranded across the country.

“People have been sleeping on the floor. Nobody has had anything to eat. It’s filthy in here,” said Ken Wagner, who was stuck in Denver’s Greyhound station for more than 15 hours when the company decided to keep its buses off the icy roads.

Up to an inch of ice coated the Kansas City area, and layers a half-inch thick glazed highways in Iowa, Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle, causing numerous traffic accidents.

Snow was scattered from the Colorado Rockies – which got 20 inches in just 12 hours at Aspen – across the Plains and Great Lakes all the way into parts of New England, where 6 inches was possible by this morning, the weather service said. The same system had dumped up to 3 feet in the mountains around Los Angeles earlier in the week.

“We got dumped on,” said Amy Williams, who was closing her Avalanche Coffee House in Colorado to go skiing in the fresh powder. “The snow is just outrageously amazing.”

Weather-related traffic deaths included five in Oklahoma, and one each in Colorado, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Two traffic deaths in Michigan were probably the result of the storm, authorities said.

A search resumed yesterday for two people who had been in a car that was found washed into a creek in Missouri, and one man was missing after an Arizona flash flood that killed another man.

Snow accumulations of nearly a foot were possible by today in parts of Michigan, South Dakota, and Iowa, where wind gusting to 25 mph caused drifting, meteorologists said.

Truckers pulled in to the Sapp Brothers truck stop at Council Bluffs, Iowa, to check weather reports and to buy groceries “and lots and lots of windshield fluid. We’re almost out of it,” said Nancy West, a manager.

Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma were hardest hit by the ice.

Westar Energy in Kansas said it could be up to a week before it can restore service to some 84,000 customers. Tens of thousands more customers were without power in the area.

People rushed out to buy groceries and whatever they could find to keep warm. “Heaters, generators, anything that doesn’t have to be plugged in,” said Doby Webb, assistant manager at a farm and home supply store in Enid, Okla.

Airlines canceled 590 departures and arrivals yesterday at O’Hare International Airport and other flights were delayed up to three hours, said Chicago Department of Aviation spokeswoman Kristen Cabanban said. Kansas City, Mo., and Des Moines, Iowa, also had delays and cancelations.

Amid the travel problems and power outages, some people welcomed the storm. “I didn’t think the snow would ever come,” said Alex Schulte, a 14-year-old snowboarding enthusiast at Sioux Falls, S.D.