The beast of the East
The dreaded “bomb cyclone” unleashed its fury across the East Coast Thursday, killing at least five and battering Boston so hard that cars were seen floating through icy flood waters.
Beantown residents posted videos of “mini icebergs” rushing past their homes, as the National Weather Service said the deluge could be the worst flooding the city has seen since 1978.
“The tidal surge came in here pretty heavy,” Boston Fire Commissioner Joseph Finn said.
“We had a lot of water down here. Probably a 3-foot tidal surge down the whole area of the coastline.”
The Massachusetts National Guard helped rescue a woman and her two kids who were stranded in their car in Marshfield.
“For someone in California, this is really, really scary. Mind-blowing,” said Joe Weatherly, who was visiting Boston from Los Angeles.
“We don’t live in a state where things shut down with the weather. I’ve just never seen this much snow in my life.”
Extreme conditions will torment the East Coast through the weekend — and more than two dozen cities may experience record-breaking temperatures. Windchills in some areas could dip to minus-40 degrees.
At least five people died from stormrelated causes Thursday, including four motorists in North and South Carolina who were killed when their vehicles ran off snow-covered streets.
A passenger in a car died near Philadelphia when the vehicle’s driver lost control at the bottom of a snow-covered hill and crashed into a commuter train.
The Jersey Shore was also pummeled by Winter Storm Grayson, with some towns getting buried under up to 17 inches of snow.
“I didn’t expect it was going to be a heavy one. That’s why I went to work today. I’m going to stay in a hotel tonight,” said New Jersey resident Orlando Igmat, whose car got stuck along the Garden State Parkway.
More than 100,000 homes and businesses lost power throughout the day, and many coastal communities were overwhelmed by floods. Wind gusts were clocked at more than 70 mph in some areas.
The storm also wreaked havoc on travel plans, as nearly 5,000 flights were canceled across the US, according to FlightAware.
Meanwhile, the National Weather Service warned residents of Savannah, Ga. — which received a very rare 1.2 inches of snow on Wednesday — about “icecovered roads and cold windchills.”
It was so frigid in South Florida that iguanas fell from trees in Miami when temperatures plummeted below 40 degrees.