A powerful and rare winter storm swept across the South on Tuesday, bringing the first-ever Blizzard Warning to the Gulf Coast and blasting communities from Texas to Florida to the Carolinas with record-shattering snow that snarled travel and brought daily life to a halt.

Some areas of New Orleans and Houston got more than four inches of snow Tuesday morning in a historic winter storm hitting the south.

Snowfall records were threatened, and in many cases broken, in states like Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, and Florida.