AILSA CHANG, HOST:
If you live in the central part of this country, you don't need us to tell you about the weather you're having. Starting in the Southwest and then spreading to the Great Lakes, wind and snow have been your daily companions, and many of you have lost power.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
This is the second bomb cyclone to hit the region in a month. In weather speak, the low strengthened as the system moved east.
DAVID ROTH: Which actually was the cause of a lot of the mischief.
SHAPIRO: David Roth is with the National Weather Service. He says although the system was not as bad as the March storm, the sudden drop in air pressure was severe.
ROTH: They recorded wind gusts across West Texas as high as 78 miles an hour. Last I heard, there were over 20 wildfires that have been caused by the system.
CHANG: KLBK photojournalist Larry Rodriguez in Lubbock, Texas, was driving around the city on assignment Wednesday when he pulled over to take a video of the dust storm.
LARRY RODRIGUEZ: Before the dust started kicking up, it was a very sunny day here. And then all of a sudden, this red-orange dust gets blown up into the sky. And you can still see the sun, but it's just orange. I've never been to Mars, but I would imagine that's what it would be like.
CHANG: Maybe some of that dirt showed up in a tweeted photo posted by Jennifer Everly in Minnesota. It shows the words Texas Dust written in dirty snow on the hood of a car.
SHAPIRO: In another part of Minnesota, the state patrol took a video of one of their troopers fighting the wind on an ice-covered road in the town of Lakefield. He slides sideways and finally succumbs falling to the ground.
CHANG: To the east, snowfall topped previous records in parts of Wisconsin.
HOPE KIRWAN, BYLINE: April always feels a little late for snow.
SHAPIRO: Hope Kerwan is a public radio reporter in southwestern Wisconsin. She pulled her car over in the town of Westby to talk to us. She says it wasn't just snow.
KIRWAN: On my commute in yesterday, there was thunder snow, where it's snowing but there's thunder and lightning. There were a lot of power outages because of the winds knocking over poles. I know a lot of communities around the La Crosse area were affected by that.
CHANG: All told, it was bad enough. But the second bomb cyclone could have been worse. For those folks along the Missouri River who got flooded after the last bomb cyclone, there's good news. The Weather Service says this storm is not expected to cause further flooding because the ground isn't frozen anymore. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.