ANOTHER NOR’EASTER
Flights, schools, power disrupted
A family of four makes its way up Carpenter Lane in Philadelphia using a shopping cart as a stroller for one of the children amid heavy snowfall Wednesday.
NEW YORK — From Eastern Pennsylvania to most of New England, a storm rolled into the Northeast with wet, heavy snow Wednesday for the second time in less than a week.
Flights were grounded, schools closed and another round of power outages was brought to a corner of the country 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.
In Pennsylvania, all commercial vehicles were banned from interstates 380 and 84, while empty trucks, double trailers and other types of commercial carriers were ordered off several other major interstates including 78, 81 and 80. Officials also reduced speeds to 45 mph.
Members of Pennsylvania’s National Guard were on standby in some eastern counties.
The Poconos Mountains — as well as parts of Massachusetts — were expected to see up to 18 inches.
The storm wasn’t predicted to be as severe as the nor’easter that inundated coastal communities and caused more than 2 million power outages from Virginia to Maine last Friday. But it still proved to be a headache for tens of thousands of families.
“It’s kind of awful,” said New York University student Alessa Raiford in slushy, sloppy Manhattan, where rain gave way to wet snow in the afternoon. “I’d rather that it be full-on snowing than rain and slush. It just makes it difficult.”
The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning into Thursday morning from the Philadelphia area through most of New England.
The storm unloaded snow at a rate of 2 or 3 inches an hour, with some places in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut getting well over a foot by Wednesday night. Butler, N.J., got 22 inches, Sloatsburg, N.Y., 23 inches and Newtown, Conn., 14 inches.
In the Philadelphia area, 6 to 8 inches were expected, according to the updated map from the NWS, with up to 11 inches to the north and west.
More than 2,600 flights across the region — about 1,900 in the New York metro area alone — were canceled.
It wasn’t much better on the ground. Motorists in Eastern Pennsylvania and elsewhere were being urged to avoid travel.
In New Jersey, the state’s major utilities reported more than 300,000 customers without power by Wednesday night, with some left over from last week.
PECO, Pennsylvania’s largest electric utility, reported more than 100,000 homes and businesses without power.
FirstEnergy, a utility company, reported a combined 48,000 customers without service in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.
That included Pike County, Pa., about 85 miles northwest of New York City, where thousands of residents were still without power before this latest round of severe weather began Wednesday.
Wind gusts of up to 30 mph were recorded around suburban Philadelphia.