Snowstorm Causes Delays and Closes Schools in Northeast
March 3, 2009
A heavy snowstorm roared up the Eastern Seaboard and blanketed the Northeast on Monday with blowing, drifting, blizzard-like conditions, forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights, shutting down thousands of schools and disrupting commutes for millions across the region.
After months of a winter that had been intermittently cold but otherwise average, the region awoke to a milk-white morning and a gusty storm that was on course to dump nearly as much snow — up to 14 inches in New York, and 18 in parts of Massachusetts — as some parts of the area have seen all season. The fast-moving storm, reaching blizzard conditions in parts of New England and falling just shy of that in New York, was already blamed for at least six deaths on roadways in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Long Island.
The burst of snow challenged or shattered records for March snowfalls in dozens of cities. In Maine all legislative offices were shut, effectively bringing the state government to a standstill.
In another sign of the storm’s impact, the New York City public school system — the largest in the country — announced a snow day for its 1.1 million students for the first time in five years. “Even though the schools are closed, the snow hasn’t put a chill on our spirit,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at a news conference on Monday.
School districts were closed from Virginia to Maine, and government offices in New Jersey and Washington — where the White House was now paired with a white lawn — had delayed openings of up to two hours. Philadelphia took the “extraordinary measure” of issuing a Code Blue weather emergency to protect its homeless population, allowing officers to force people off the streets and into shelters.
Along with a blanket of snow, the storm brought with it a number of rarities. Whiteout conditions and high winds forced the Staten Island Ferry to cancel service for an hour — “We can’t remember the last time,” said a spokesman — just before the start of the Monday morning rush hour. Dangerous conditions kept many drivers off the roads in New Jersey, creating an unusually thin stream of traffic. And students who on any other Monday would be sitting in classrooms, grabbed their sleds instead and took to parks across the region.
In Riverside Park on Manhattan’s west side, Sebastian Hampel, 6, plopped himself face down on a bright orange sled and slid down a hill, his face buried beneath his royal blue snow suit. After landing face first in a snow bank, he stood up and announced that a tooth that had been loose for some time had finally been jostled out.
“He’s going to get some money for that one,” said his mother, Christina Torres, 46.
The storm — a late-winter nebula that formed off the coast of South Carolina over the weekend — shot up the Eastern Seaboard overnight on a track that took it along the I-95 and I-85 corridors. By Monday morning, the massive system stretched from Virginia to eastern Quebec, leaving in its wake sights not often seen in the South: snow-covered trees in Atlanta, slushy streets in Virginia and sledding in Alabama.
In South Carolina, emergency workers fanned out across a snow-swept, 20-mile stretch of I-85 to hand out food and water to drivers who had been stranded for more than four hours late Sunday night. And parts of the south where the snowfall had ended, were still coping with its aftermath. Power companies from South Carolina to Virginia, where Gov. Tim Kaine declared a state of emergency on Monday, reported more than a quarter million outages as of early Monday.
In the Northeast, more than six inches of snow had fallen in and around New York City by 8 a.m., and seven to twelve inches were reported across parts of Long Island and Connecticut, according to the National Weather Service. Lighter snowfall — between five and eight inches — covered parts of northeastern New Jersey and the lower Hudson Valley.
In Boston, already draped in eight inches of fresh powder, snow was falling at a rate of about an inch an hour. More than six inches had accumulated in Philadelphia, while further south about three to six inches had fallen in the Washington area, said Carrie McCabe, a meteorologist at AccuWeather.com.
“It’s not going to be the nicest of afternoons, though it will be fun for sledding,” she said.
With the storm piling snow on top of tarmacs and cutting visibility sharply, airports across the region were brought to their knees. As of 10 a.m., roughly a thousand flights had been scrapped in the Tri-state area alone, leaving countless travelers stranded in terminals. At La Guardia Airport, more than 450 flights were canceled; at Newark Liberty International Airport, 335 were scrubbed, and at John F. Kennedy International airport, 119 flights were canceled.
At Stewart International Airport in upstate New York, there was no hope at all: every flight was taken off the board.
One traveler, Sally Riker, 33, had been stranded at La Guardia for 24 hours after two different flights to Atlanta were canceled — one on Sunday, and the other on Monday morning. She said she hoped to catch an afternoon flight but was not terribly optimistic.
“I’ve heard that it’s going to be delayed again because of icy runways,” she said. “One day we’ll get out of here.”
In addition to the flight cancellations, major bus carriers, including Greyhound and Peter Pan, canceled all trips after midnight.
Most New York City subways were operating on or close to schedule, but there were significant delays on the A, G and L lines, and all New York City buses were delayed, the Metropolitan Transit Authority reported.
At the Van Cortlandt Park-242 St. station in the Bronx, commuters slipped and struggled to stay upright on the slick platforms as they boarded trains to work. Cristy Contreras, 23, held the hand of her 1-year-old daughter, Ghislaine, as they boarded the No. 1 train. With schools closed and no day care open in the area, Ms. Contreras said she had no choice but to take her daughter with her to work.
“It’s terrible,” she said. “I just don’t have anywhere else for her to go. So she has to come with me.” Officials with New Jersey Transit said commuter trains were running up to 25 minutes late, with some cancellations, and New Jersey Transit buses were running 20 minutes late. The Long Island Rail Road also reported scattered delays. Metro-North reported delays of up to 30 minutes.
The National Weather Service said that the heaviest snowfall for the New York region swept across the area between 7 and 8 a.m. on Monday. Many areas then saw a two or three hour lull in the storm, but the snowfall resumed in late morning and was expected to drop at least another three inches across the Tri-state area. By the evening, total accumulations were predicted to reach as high as 10 inches in the city and 14 inches on Long Island and parts of Connecticut. Wind gusts could reach up to 35 miles per hour, which would classify the storm as a northeaster, meteorologists said.
“It’s the first of March, which you know is the month that we say comes in like a lion and out like a lamb,” Mayor Bloomberg said at a news conference on Sunday. “And while it is too soon to be counting sheep, it’s pretty clear that the lions are getting ready to roar, if you like that.”
The looming storm sent the city’s sanitation and transportation departments scurrying to prepare.
Mr. Bloomberg said the city had dispatched more than 2,000 sanitation workers to salt roads and operate 1,400 plows on the nearly 6,000 miles of New York City streets.
“To plow our streets, it’s like plowing from here to Los Angeles and back,” he said.
Mr. Bloomberg also asked residents to check in on older friends and neighbors, and said that New Yorkers who had the day off should use it to go shopping and eat at their neighborhood restaurants — “which I’m sure could use the business,” he added. As a safety measure for drivers, many states and cities lowered the speed limits on roads and highways.
The perilous nature of the whiteout conditions was evident across the Northeast. In Boston, a pregnant woman and her mother were killed when their car spun off an icy road and hit a snowplow Sunday night. Two other Massachusetts women were killed in a weather-related accident on a highway in Connecticut, and crashes in Rhode Island and Long Island claimed the lives of at least two other people.
Spinouts were common across the region, but officials said that for the most part drivers were avoiding treacherous conditions.
“Fortunately, folks heeded the governor’s request to delay their commutes,” said Peter Judge, a spokesman for the Massachusetts emergency management agency. “The volume spoke volumes.”
Although brisk and powerful, the storm did not technically meet blizzard conditions in some areas. The weather service defines a blizzard not by the amount of snowfall — even though they tend to be accompanied by significant snow — but by three consecutive hours of winds blowing at 35 m.p.h. and visibility of less than a quarter-mile. Since October, New York has had only 19.3 inches of snow, as measured in Central Park, slightly higher than the normal of 18.7 inches for the entire winter.
On Feb. 13, 2006, Central Park was blanketed in 26.9 inches of snow in a matter of hours, the biggest snowstorm since record keeping began 1869.
The current storm, which dumped about 8 inches in Boston, a foot to 14 inches in north-central Massachusetts and Southern New Hampshire and about 10 inches in Maine, comes amid a season of above average snowfall for New England. The average snowfall in Boston is 35 inches; Boston has received 64 inches of snow so far this year, said Bill Simpson, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass.But many New Englanders appeared to be taking the deluge of snow in stride.
“It’s your basic nor’easter and, hey, it’s northern New England,” said James C. Van Dongen, a spokesman for the New Hampshire Department of Safety. “It snows here.”
But like many other people, he said he was ready for this to be the last of it.
“It was a good storm,” Mr. Dongen said. “Now I’m ready for spring.”
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