Rare snowflakes start falling from Miss. to Fla.

PENSACOLA, Fla. (AP) -- It took back-to-back blizzards to paralyze the nation’s capital, but in the Deep South it only takes a couple inches of snow.

Flakes were falling — or threatened — today from Texas to the Florida Panhandle and then up along the coasts of Georgia and South Carolina, bringing a rare white landscape to spots that haven’t seen snow in a decade or longer. The storm was crawling east out of Texas, where it left the Dallas area with more than a foot of snow, nearly 200 traffic accidents, thousands without power and hundreds of canceled flights.

Far less snow was falling in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, though the effect was still crippling.