Record snow buries East
NEW YORK – A record-breaking storm buried sections of the Northeast under more than 2 feet of snow on Sunday, marooning thousands of air travelers and making even a walk to the corner store treacherous.
The National Weather Service said 26.9 inches of snow had fallen in Central Park, the most for a single storm since record-keeping started in 1869. The old record was 26.4 inches in December 1947.
Wind gusting as high as 60 mph blew the snow sideways and raised a risk of coastal flooding in New England. And in a rare display, lightning lit up the falling snow before dawn in the New York and Philadelphia areas, producing muffled winter thunder.
“We might not see anything like this again in our lifetime,” Jason Rosenfarb said as he walked with his 5-year-old daughter Haley in Central Park.
The storm came on the heels of an unusually mild January that had people shedding jackets, and ski resorts lamenting.
Elsewhere, 21 inches of snow fell at Columbia, Md., between Baltimore and Washington, as well as at East Brunswick, N.J., Hartford, Conn., and West Caln Township west of Philadelphia, the National Weather Service said. Philadelphia’s average for an entire winter is about 21 inches.
“It’s going to be a menace trying to clean it up,” said Mayor Scott T. Rumana in Wayne, N.J. New York officials said snow removal costs the city about $1 million per inch.
The possibility of coastal flooding was a major concern for Massachusetts as wind hit 60 mph, said Peter Judge, spokesman for the state’s Emergency Management Agency. Meteorologists predicted 2 1/2 -foot storm surges from Cape Ann to Cape Cod, with seas off the coast running up to 25 feet.
The storm closed all three of the New York metropolitan area’s major airports, and airlines canceled more than 500 inbound and departing flights – 200 each at LaGuardia and Newark airports and 120 at Kennedy.
Delta Air Lines canceled arrivals and departures at Washington, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore, Providence, R.I., and Hartford, Conn.
The airport closures and grounded planes stranded travelers elsewhere across the country. About 7,500 people were stuck at Florida’s Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, spokesman Steve Belleme said.
Service in and out of New York’s Pennsylvania Station on the Long Island Rail Road was canceled. Amtrak reported a few cancelations and delays in the Northeast Corridor but said most trains remained in service.
More than 85,000 homes and businesses were blacked out in Maryland, according to Baltimore Gas & Electric Co. spokeswoman Linda Foy. More than 60,000 customers were reported in the dark in northern Virginia, and thousands more lost power in parts of Delaware, New Jersey and on New York’s Long Island.