Blizzard pounds Eastern Seaboard
Monster storm spanning 20 states causes travel chaos, kills at least 18
NEW YORK— A powerful blizzard hitting the U.S. East Coast has already surpassed forecasters’ dire predictions, claiming at least 18 lives, flooding coasts, shutting down Broadway and paralyzing life for residents of at least 20 states from Georgia to Massachusetts.
The storm was well on its way to smashing snowfall records.
All roads, bridges and tunnels in and out of New York City officially closed at 2:30 p.m. Saturday, with only emergency vehicles allowed.
Bus service was cancelled at noon, and train and subway lines located aboveground were to shut down at 4 p.m., New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said at a news conference.
New York could see about 65 to 75 centimetres of snow, with winds gusting to 80 kilometres per hour, Mayor Bill de Blasio warned earlier in the day.
That would make this one of the five worst storms in the city’s history. De Blasio implored residents to stay indoors.
“We are going into uncharted territory here,” he said. “There’s absolutely no reason to be out in what will be one of the worst snowstorms in New York City history.”
At least 20 states and the District of Columbia have seen snow and ice since Friday or were expected to do so by the end of the day, according to the National Weather Service. They range from Georgia and the Carolinas in the South, to Illinois and Indiana in the Midwest, all the way north to Connecticut and southeastern Massachusetts.
“We’re still really in the middle of the height of the storm right now,” Patrick Burke, a meteorologist at the weather service’s Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Md., said in the early afternoon.
Some towns in Maryland recorded more than 76 centimetres of snow, while an amateur radio operator in Glengary, W.Va., reported 102 centimetres, Burke said.
“The totals are coming up quickly in New York, Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey,” he added. “They’re still catching up.”
The snow was being whipped up by winds that reached 120 km/h at Dewey Beach in Delaware and Langley Air Force Base in Virginia, according to the weather service. More than 10,000 commercial flights around the country were cancelled between Friday and Saturday, most of them due to the storm, according to Flightaware.com, which tracks airline service. Tens of thousands of homes were without electricity.
New York City officials reported 200 traffic accidents, as well as at least one fire believed to be caused by a space heater.
But for many New Yorkers, even the storm’s predicted historic status didn’t slow down daily life.
“I went to work only to find out that I didn’t need to be there,” said Joan Anderson, who was heading home on an underground subway line. “When you live in a place with frequent snow, as long as you’re pre- pared, it’s fine.”
Being prepared, however, means different things to different people. For Chris Harper, a sales clerk who was also sent home early from work, it meant just enough food for the night.
“It’s only a day,” he said, unfazed by the icy swirl coating his jacket.
Others had to trudge to work through streets coated in packed-down snow and ice.
Along the New Jersey and Delaware coastlines, the storm caused ice-laden seawater to rush into the streets of beach towns.
This same area, a network of lowlying communities, brackish bays and dune-covered oceanfront, was hit hard by superstorm Sandy, and another round of flooding was a familiar scene.
“The barrier islands here are very narrow, so it’s usually the bay that breaches,” said Chip French, an Avalon, N.J., resident whose town sits on a narrow stretch of land alongside the Atlantic. “We have ice floes going down the streets of the barrier islands right now.”
French said the flooding was not as bad as his community had experienced during Sandy, but he expected many of his neighbours would see significant damage to their homes.
Other communities saw more extensive flooding. The weather service reported “near record major” flooding along Delaware’s coast.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who returned from the campaign trail in New Hampshire on Friday, told reporters that he had directed state resources in the southern region to communities like Avalon to ensure that anyone displaced by the flooding had a place to go.
The state had learned from Sandy, he said. In the years since, it had purchased and demolished hundreds of unsafe properties along the coast.
“Those people are now in homes at higher ground where they do not need to worry about losing their belongings and have their lives affected by repetitive flooding,” he said at a Saturday news conference.
While highways remained pass- able, about 15,000 customers were without power across the southern coastal part of the state, Christie said.
In Kentucky, drivers on a long stretch of Interstate 75 south of Lexington were stranded overnight because of a string of crashes and windblown snow. For Jeff Greenberg, a mortgage broker from Toronto, and the two others in an all-wheel-drive Acura, their sole source of overnight sustenance was a shared 20-ounce bottle of Coca-Cola. After being stuck for hours on I-75 near London, Greenberg said he was without food and in need of a restroom.
“Right now, we’re a little hungry, a little tired, the Coke is warm, and we’re waiting,” said Greenberg, who was travelling to Florida with his wife and their teenage son.
Their route took them from being stranded overnight on the Interstate to being detoured to a state highway, where traffic was also snarled.
Elsewhere along the stretch of road in Kentucky locked down by snow and ice, it took nearly 12 hours for Zack Crites’s vehicle to move all of 15 metres. And for April Montesinos and her family, supplies dwindled while their Chevrolet Traverse sat “in the exact same spot” for more than 18 hours.