More than 2 feet of snow blanketed parts of western New York and Pennsylvania today, as a lake-effect snowstorm disrupted post-Thanksgiving travel and threatened to bring up to 5 feet of snow to some areas by Tuesday morning.

The snowfall was heaviest along Interstate 90, the National Weather Service said, which hugs Lake Erie from Buffalo, New York, through Pennsylvania and on to Cleveland. In some areas, white-out conditions could be life-threatening, the service said. National Guard troops were dispatched in New York and Pennsylvania.

Parts of northern Michigan recorded 30 inches of snow as well, and officials in Grand Rapids, Michigan, blamed the wintry conditions for a pileup involving about a dozen vehicles Thursday night. Jerry Byrne, director of the county roads commission, said that while traveling just a mile during the storm, drivers could go from clear pavement to white-out conditions.

“If you’re not thinking winter, it’s what gets you in trouble,” he said.

Interstates in Pennsylvania across the New York state line were impassable, the New York State Thruway Authority said this morning, and some areas remained closed to commercial trucks.

Erie International Airport in Pennsylvania was closed, too, as about 30 inches of snow fell on the city. At least that amount had also fallen on some areas of western New York, the National Weather Service said this morning. Nearly 34 inches were recorded in Perrysburg, New York, about 35 miles south of Buffalo.

Kevin Ricart, 33, who was visiting family in Erie, Pennsylvania, from Chicago for the holiday, had hoped to take his wife, Brittany, and their 2-year-old son, Robbie, to the Experience Children’s Museum downtown. But their plans were quickly derailed.

“Peach Street was a horror show,” Ricart said, referring to the city’s busy commercial corridor that stretches from downtown to a mall. “It was backed up as far as we could see, and a semi was stuck diagonally in the road. We just said never mind and turned around.”

In Jamestown, New York, not far from the Pennsylvania border, Robin McBride experienced the dangers firsthand on Friday when she decided to take her car to the mechanic.

“It was that light snow that you kind of slide on because it was wet,” McBride said. “I thought I was going to die.”

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When she arrived for work at the Kwik Fill truck stop in Jamestown early this morning, just off Interstate 86, commercial trucks were parked two or three deep to wait out the bad conditions and road closures. By around 10 a.m., they had started to return to the road, she said.

According to AAA, the automobile organization, nearly 80 million people were expected to travel for Thanksgiving this year. About 3 million people in the United States were expected to travel by air Sunday.

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Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York declared a state of emergency Friday in nearly a dozen counties, and towns across western New York were bracing for more snow to come as the storm pushed east this weekend. Forecasters said that effects could last through Tuesday.

Buffalo could receive up to 6 inches of snow through Sunday, when the Bills were scheduled to host the San Francisco 49ers at their stadium in nearby Orchard Park, New York. The Bills on Friday afternoon called for shovelers to help clear the stadium during the winter season.

Sarah Pierce, the mayor of Watertown, New York, which was expected to receive up to 4 feet of snow, said small-business events today were postponed as the community readied for more snow. The city manager had called for “all hands on deck” at the fire, police and public works departments, and crews had been clearing roads for the past 24 hours.“We usually get hit with a few of these every winter, so people are certainly prepared,” she said. “We know what to expect.”

The heavy snowfall — the first of the season in the region — was a lake-effect storm, caused by cold air pushing over the relatively warm waters of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, said Mitchell Gaines, lead meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Binghamton, New York. The storms pick up moisture over the lakes and then dump it when they hit colder land, typically blanketing relatively small areas with huge amounts of snow.

“We’ve had a fairly warm fall, and that’s been the case the last few years as well,” Gaines said. “We’ve been seeing more in the way of these high-impact lake-effect snowfall events,” during which, he added, the accumulations are more often measured in feet.

Lake Erie is particularly warm this year, with an average surface temperature of around 52 degrees, compared with a historical average of about 45 degrees this time of year.

In Ohio, the lake-effect storms can create dramatically different conditions in nearby areas: This morning, downtown Cleveland had not gotten even a dusting of snow, while towns about 20 miles northeast had recorded more than 4 inches.

The National Weather Service said that Arctic air would bring the coldest temperatures since mid-February to parts of the northern Great Plains into next week, with some areas of North Dakota recording wind chills of minus-40 degrees Fahrenheit. Subfreezing temperatures were also expected early Sunday in south Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and the Florida Panhandle.

A winter weather advisory was in effect across West Virginia; northern Kentucky; southern Illinois and Indiana; Missouri; and eastern Kansas, with a few inches of snow and slippery road conditions in the forecast.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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