U.S. East Coast brought to standstill by blizzard
NEW YORK — A blizzard with hurricane-force winds brought much of the U.S. East Coast to a standstill Saturday, dumping as much as a metre of snow, stranding tens of thousands of travellers and shutting down the nation’s capital and its largest city.
After days of weather warnings, most of the 80 million people in the storm’s path heeded requests to stay home and off the roads. Yet at least 17 deaths were blamed on the weather — most from traffic accidents, but several people also died while shovelling snow.
And more snow was to come, with dangerous conditions expected to persist until early Sunday, forecasters said.
“This is going to be one of those generational events, where your parents talk about how bad it was,” Ryan Maue, a meteorologist for WeatherBell Analytics, said from Tallahassee, Florida, which saw some flakes.
The system dropped snow from the Gulf Coast to New England. By afternoon, areas near Washington had surpassed 75 centimetres.
Besides snow and wind, the National Weather Service predicted two to three centimetres of ice for the Carolinas and potentially serious coastal flooding for the mid-Atlantic region.
“This is kind of a Top 10 snowstorm,” said weather service winter storm expert Paul Kocin, who co-wrote a two-volume textbook on blizzards. And for New York and Washington this looks like Top 5, he said: “It’s a big one.”
By early evening, the core of the system was rolling away from Washington toward New York, where normally bustling streets around Rockefeller Center, Penn Station and other landmarks were mostly empty. With Broadway shows dark, thin crowds shuffled through a different kind of Great White Way in Times Square.
The ice and snow cancelled more than 4,400 flights on Saturday, bringing the weekend total to 6,300. Airlines hoped to be back in business by Sunday afternoon.