A blast of freezing rain across Georgia and the Carolinas on Thursday closed schools, snarled traffic and caused power outages to more than 450,000 customers, and at least one death was blamed on the storm when an ice-laden tree crashed through a house. The widespread outages were caused by the ice that formed on tree limbs and fell onto power lines. While electricity was quickly restored to some, outages by early evening still totaled 260,000 in South Carolina’s upstate, about 170,000 in North Carolina, 55,000 in northeast Georgia and 34,700 in the Atlanta area.