Winter wallop
MESSY MONDAY AS STORM SLAMS AREA
New Yorkers hunkered down on Sunday as a nasty winter storm threatened to wreak havoc on the busiest day of the year for travelers.
The five boroughs were pelted with a wintry mix of sleet, snow and freezing before changing over to steady rain later in the afternoon.
The bad weather came as hundreds of thousands of people traveled the city’s roads, transit hubs and airports following the long Thanksgiving weekend.
The Port Authority last week estimated some 1.8 million people would use the metropolitan area’s three major airports over the course of the weekend, which would set an all-time high.
More than 1,000 flights were delayed and another 116 were cancelled at Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark airports by 4 p.m., according to the flight-tracking website FlightAware. Inbound flights were delayed by an average of more than an hour at the three airports.
Maya Groh, 18, a student at Columbia University, had to make a last-minute change to her return trip from Raleigh, N.C. after her 5:30 p.m. flight to LaGuardia was delayed by an hour.
“I called and they said you can switch to an earlier one [for a $75 fee],” said Groh. “This one was delayed an hour and a half, too.”
Service out of the Port Authority Bus Terminal was hit hard too. Scheduled trips were canceled on buses headed for upstate New York and the Hudson Valley, which are expected to be buried in more than a foot of snow.
The cold rain will continue overnight in the city and is expected to change back to snow between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m. Monday, said National Weather Service meteorologist Jim Connolly. The city could get hit with as much as 3 inches — and the snow could continue to fall into Tuesday morning.
The freezing rain coincided with a power outage in south Brooklyn. Con Ed officials reported that more than 4,000 customers in Dyker Heights and Windsor Terrace were without electricity.
The inconvenient timing of the bad weather drew an aggressive response from elected officials.
Gov. Cuomo returned early from a holiday vacation in Puerto Rico on Saturday to prepare for the storm. He put the state’s National Guard on standby.
The city’s Office of Emergency Management issued a travel advisory for Sunday and Monday.
The agency’s commissioner Deanne Criswell urged travelers to use mass transit on Monday “where possible as the roads could look different from when you leave home in the morning.”