CHICAGO, Feb 13 (Reuters) - A winter storm packing blizzard conditions to the north and a deadly New Orleans tornado to the south closed schools, forced hundreds of flight cancellations and disrupted travel from Kansas east to Ohio on Tuesday. The advancing weather system unleashed severe thunderstorms and a tornado on New Orleans, knocking out power and killing an elderly woman living in a trailer provided to Hurricane Katrina victims, police superintendent Warren Riley said. The National Weather Service said one tornado was confirmed, but there may have been others. The hardest-hit areas in the Midwest could get up to a foot (30 cm) of snow in a band across the middle parts of Illinois, Indiana and into northwest Ohio, forecasters said. Much of that same area was under a blizzard warning because winds up to 40 miles (64 km) per hour threatened white-out conditions, the weather service said. It advised that travel would be "extremely dangerous." Mitsubishi Motors North America closed its assembly plant at Normal, Illinois, after 250 of its 1,700-member workforce couldn't make it to the plant because of road conditions. In addition, icy roads disrupted the flow of parts to the plant. "I've never seen anything like it," said plant spokesman Dan Irvin. "It's the wind. It's snowing horizontally." About six inches (15.2 cm) had fallen and the wind had created tall snowdrifts. School closings were common from the Kansas City area east to St. Louis, through Indianapolis to Ohio and north to the Chicago region. The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana closed for the day, giving more than 41,000 students an unexpected day off.In Columbus the state's legislature canceled its Tuesday session. In Chicago more than 500 flights were canceled at O'Hare International Airport and dozens more at Midway. Entergy Corp. <ETR.N> said the New Orleans tornado had knocked out power to as many as 29,000 customers. Mayor Ray Nagin, touring the newly damaged areas, told Reuters the tornado was another setback for the city, which has less than half its pre-Katrina population of 500,000. "For the city, it's a bad thing, because it further unnerves everybody that's trying to recover from Katrina," he said.
