Another snowstorm clobbers Northeast

For the second time in less than a week, a storm rolled into the Northeast with wet, heavy snow Wednesday, grounding flights, closing schools and bringing another round of power outages to a corner of the United States still recovering from the previous blast of winter.

The nor’easter knocked out electricity to hundreds of thousands of customers and produced “thundersnow” as it made its way up the coast, with flashes of lightning and booming thunder from the Philadelphia area to New York City. A New Jersey middle school teacher was struck by lightning but survived.

Officials urged people to stay off the roads.

“It’s kind of awful,” said New York University student Alessa Raiford, who put two layers of clothing on a pug named Jengo before taking him for a walk in slushy, sloppy Manhattan, where rain gave way to wet snow in the afternoon. “I’d rather that it be fullon snowing than rain and slush. It just makes it difficult.”

The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning into this morning from the Philadelphia area through most of New England.

The storm unloaded snow at a rate of two or three inches an hour, with some places in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut getting well over a foot by Wednesday night. Butler, New Jersey, got 22 inches, Sloatsburg, New York, 23 inches and Newtown, Connecticut, 14 inches.

Major cities along the Interstate 95 corridor saw much less. Philadelphia International Airport recorded about six inches and New York City received a little over two.

More than 2,600 flights across the region — about 1,900 in the New York metro area alone — were cancelled.

It wasn’t much better on the ground, with Pennsylvania and New York banning big rigs from some major highways and transit agencies reducing or cancelling service on trains and buses.