Another storm clobbers region; outages increase

NEW YORK — 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 country still recovering from the previous blast of winter.

The nor’easter knocked out electricity to hundreds of thousands of customers and produced “thunder snow” 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 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.

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, with Pennsylvania and New York banning big rigs from some major highways and transit agencies reducing or canceling service on trains and buses.

The storm wasn’t predicted to be as severe as the nor’easter that toppled trees, 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 the tens of thousands of customers still in the dark from the earlier storm.

In New Jersey, the state’s major utilities reported more than 300,000 customers without power by Wednesday night.