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Frigid air and high winds were causing dangerous Martin Luther King Jr. Day travel conditions across the eastern U.S. on Monday after a powerful winter storm pummeled the region over the weekend.

The National Weather Service forecasts temperatures will be more than 20 degrees below normal throughout the Northeast, with gusty winds and wind chills approaching minus 40 degrees in northern New York and Vermont.

The bitter cold is expected to frustrate travelers once again with the flight-tracking site FlightAwarereporting nearly 280 arrivals and departures canceled as of Monday morning.

The weather stymied traffic around New York's LaGuardia Airport and Boston's Logan International Airport, according to the Federal Aviation Administration site.

The harsh and blustery conditions are expected to calm down by Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.

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Another system is already taking shape over the Rockies that could swamp the same region with even more snow by the end of the week.

The fierce storm in the northeast has claimed the life of at least one person. A subcontractor repairing a downed line was killed in Middletown, Connecticut, on Sunday after a tree collapsed, police said.

Utilities in Connecticut reported more than 20,000 customers without power by Sunday afternoon.

Amtrak canceled trains across the Midwest and Northeast over the weekend, but promised full service would resume Monday. Boston's transit system urged commuters to allow 10 to 15 minutes of extra travel time and warned of icy conditions for pedestrians come Monday.

The storm — caused by the clash of an Arctic high-pressure system with a low-pressure system coming through the Ohio Valley — wreaked havoc on air travel and other forms of transportation all weekend.

Mountain regions saw significantly more, to the delight of ski resort operators.

New York's Adirondacks registered up to 20 inches while western Massachusetts' Berkshires saw as much as 10 and parts of northern New England were on track to approach 24 inches of snow.

Earlier, the storm walloped the Midwest and Great Plains with freezing temperatures and more than two feet of snow in some areas.

Authorities in Kansas, Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois attributed five deaths to the winter blast, including a snowplow driver who was killed after his vehicle rolled over and a 12-year-old girl in suburban Chicago who died when a snow fort collapsed on her.

Local police said a 9-year-old who was in the fort with Esther Jung, of Arlington Heights, survived.