Another snowstorm clobbers Northeast
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 “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 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, 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 6 inches and New York City received a little over 2.
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.
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.
Wind gusts up to 60 mph were forecast on Cape Cod, 45 mph at the Jersey shore and 30 mph around suburban Philadelphia.
Ten people were taken to hospitals with symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning after running a generator inside a home in North White Plains, New York, police said. All were expected to survive.
A teacher was struck by lightning while holding an umbrella on bus duty outside a school in Manchester Township, New Jersey, police said. She was taken to a hospital with minor injuries.
Members of the Northeastern University women’s basketball team pushed their bus back on course after it was stuck in the snow outside a practice facility in Philadelphia. The Huskies were in the city to compete in the 2018 CAA Women’s Basketball Tournament.