Blizzard chills Northeast

BOSTON — The biggest snowstorm of the season roared across the Midwest and into the Northeast on Saturday, frustrating passengers on delayed or canceled flights nationwide and causing runs on staples at stores along the East Coast.

Blizzard warnings were issued for eastern New York and southern New England. Meteorologist Bill Giles of the New England Weather Service predicted a monster dump of snow.

“We’re looking at potentially 20 to 30 inches here in eastern Massachusetts,” Giles said. “There is rarely such thing as a normal storm, but this is one of the big ones, one of the blockbuster types in terms of the intensity with which the snow is expected to come down.

“From midnight until about 8 in the morning, we are expecting rates of 2 to as much as 4 inches per hour,” he continued. “That is rare. This storm is just exploding into just a bomb of a storm off the coastline.”

The bad weather led authorities to shut down Philadelphia International Airport for about six hours Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration reported. Bradley International Airport, near Hartford, Conn., and Westchester County (N.Y.) Airport also were closed because of the snow, the FAA said, and airlines delayed or canceled hundreds of flights to and from other East Coast airports.

The storm came down from Canada on Saturday morning and pushed its way through the Midwest, depositing as much as a foot and a half of snow across Wisconsin and Michigan. Flights to O’Hare International Airport in Chicago were delayed five hours or more, the FAA said.

At Washington Dulles International Airport, officials said “some 100 or more” flights would be scrapped before the winter blasts made their way out of the nation’s capital. Authorities described the runways as snow-covered and said pilots were hampered by “terrible visibility.”

Airports in New York remained open, though on a limited schedule, as what began as light flurries around noon turned into a driving storm by early evening. The skies were not likely to clear until midday Sunday, leaving as much as 18 inches of snow behind.

Bitter winds and below-freezing temperatures kept most New Yorkers indoors. Side streets in Manhattan were ghostly by early evening, except for small groups of children wrapped tightly in scarves and clutching their saucers and sleds.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, clad in a leather jacket and heavy sweater, turned up Saturday afternoon at a Department of Sanitation garage, where garbage trucks were being transformed with front-end plows into street cleaners. The mayor reassured New Yorkers that the streets would be cleared by Monday’s rush hour and that the city’s 6,500 miles of roadway would be plowed at least once. Some streets, he said, would get two cleanings.

Clearly, Bloomberg, who is up for re-election this year, has learned the lesson that every mayor has taken to heart since 1969, when the streets of Queens were not cleaned after a huge storm — and Mayor John V. Lindsay, seeking the Republican nomination for a second term, lost his party’s primary.

“We’re going to take care of this city regardless of the costs,” Bloomberg said at a news conference Saturday, “and Monday morning we’ll worry about how to pay for it.” He estimated the cost of the cleanup at $1 million per inch of snow.

All along the East Coast, from Virginia northward, the list of closings started early Saturday. Synagogues announced they would forego afternoon services, and many churches cut their Saturday evening observances short as well. Public schools in Maryland and Virginia canceled Saturday morning’s scheduled administration of the Scholastic Assessment Test, the standardized test many colleges require for admission.

Grocery stores in the Boston area, as elsewhere, were mobbed all day Saturday. Cars jockeyed for spaces in parking lots and shoppers waited watchfully for available shopping carts. Food flew off the shelves of many supermarkets, as shoppers stocked up as if in advance of Armageddon.

“Has every one in town decided to buy chicken broth?” asked one shopper, Cathy Day, as she foraged for soup ingredients at the Stop-and-Shop in Hingham.

The region where Hingham lies, south of Boston, was expected to be hard hit along with other coastal areas, such as Cape Cod. Forecasters predicted as much as 30 inches of snow before the storm passed.

Both of Sunday’s National Football League playoff games are being played in cities affected by the storm. In Philadelphia, fans of the Philadelphia Eagles — which play the Atlanta Falcons for the National Football Conference championship — welcomed the harsh weather.

“The Falcons are a dome team,” said Maurice Jackson of Philadelphia. “They don’t know what they are getting into.”

The Falcons play inside in the Georgia Dome but practiced outdoors last week at their training site in Flowery Branch, Ga., where temperatures were in the 30s.

In Pittsburgh, where the Steelers host the New England Patriots on Sunday in the American Football Conference championship game, about 4 inches of snow fell Saturday morning. By afternoon, most of the sidewalks had been cleared by workers pushing snow-blowers, and the streets were thick with brown slush.

Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers’ first-year quarterback, grew up in Findlay, Ohio, where snowy and windy winters are not uncommon. “I’m used to the cold and snow and rain,” he said. But, he added, “It doesn’t mean I like it.”

Mehren reported from Boston and Baum from New York.