Washington: Snow and ice storms have killed at least 29 people in six US states and hundreds of thousands of homes were left without electricity.

Hardest hit were Missouri and Oklahoma, where trees and electric lines broke under the heavy weight of ice accumulating since Friday. Streets were slick and dangerous, media reports said.

Over 300,000 homes in Missouri were without power yesterday (Jan 15, 2007).

But even in California, which was touched by freezing temperatures, damages to the agricultural industry were mounting.

Losses to California's $1.3-billion-a-year citrus industry were estimated at half a billion dollars, or about 38 percent of the year's income, the Los Angeles Times reported. The last major freeze damage to crops was in 1998, with $700 million of crops lost.

"We have suffered significant damage," Joel Nelsen, president of Citrus Mutual, a growers' trade group, was quoted as saying.

Most of the deaths were from traffic accidents, sources  reported.

On Monday, the storm front moved into the northeast. A man hurtled to his death over a bridge while trying to avoid another car sliding into his in New York.

The storms began Friday with an Arctic air mass that pushed across the centre of the country from Canada down to Texas. In Dallas, 400 flights out of the international airport were cancelled Sunday due to the icy tarmac.