EXTREME COLD DAMAGE SPREADS
Warming centres around region help residents cope
Among Friday’s fallout from frigid weather: Montreal police supervisors met with an officer who was caught on video threatening a homeless man in the cold; St. James United Church worked to restore its heat for a wedding after a pipe burst; Montrealers prepared to warm up; and the U.S. northeast started to dig out.
BOSTON — Homeowners and motorists dug out across the white-blanketed Northeast on Friday as extreme cold ushered in by the storm threatened fingers and toes but kept the snow powdery and mercifully easy to shovel. At least 13 deaths were blamed on the storm as it swept across the nation’s eastern half.
While the snowfall had all but stopped by morning across the hard-hit Philadelphia-to-Boston corridor and many highways and streets were soon cleared and reopened, temperatures were well below -10 C. .
“The snow is T easy ■ to move because the air was so cold when it snowed that it’s sort of light and fluffy stuff — but, uh, it’s cold,” Avalon (Nick) Minton said as he cleared the entrance to his garage and sidewalk in Arlington, Mass. “That’s the main part. It’s cold.”
And officials from the upper Midwest to New England were preparing for another arctic blast over the next few days that could be even worse.
The heaviest snow fell north of Boston in Boxford, Mass., which received nearly 60 centimetres of snow. Nearly 45 centimetres fell in Boston and in western New York near Rochester. New York’s Central Park had about 15 cm of snow.
Temperatures reached -22 C in Burlington, Vt. — with a wind chill of 29 below — and -16 C in Boston. Wind chills there and in Providence, R.I., made it feel like -29 Friday morning, and the forecast called for more of the same into Saturday.
Emergency officials warned that anyone spending more than a few minutes outdoors in such conditions could suffer frostbite.
Wellington Ferreira said the cold was worse than the snow as he cleared a sidewalk in front of Johnny D’s Uptown Restaurant and Music Club in Somerville, Mass.
“My ears are frozen,” he said.
Warming centres opened around the region, homeless shelters received more people, and cities took special measures to look after those most vulnerable to the cold.
Teams in New York City searched the streets for homeless people, while in Boston, police asked resi- dents to call 911 if they saw someone in need.
In Newport, R.I., the Seaman’s Church Institute said it would stay open round-theclock until the cold breaks to give mariners and others who work in or around the harbour a warm place to stay, shower and eat.
The light, powdery snow was a blessing in another respect: It did not weigh down electrical lines or tree limbs, and as a result, there were only a few thousand power outages across the Northeast.