Hit by blizzard, East Coast starts to burrow its way out
A massive snowstorm that blanketed the East Coast moved out to sea Sunday, leaving 18 people dead, near-record snowfall in some major cities and heavy flooding along the coast. Residents emerged with snowplows and shovels, and tens of thousands of stranded travelers were scrambling to get to their destinations or find alternate arrangements.
The morning arrived on the Eastern Seaboard with low temperatures and clear skies, as states and cities assessed the storm’s impact and outlined cleanup efforts that could last well into the week.
“Happy Sunday to all,’’ Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said at the first of a several news conferences scheduled on Sunday. “We survived, and then some.’’
In New York City, where the storm left more than 30 inches of snow in some parts, grappling with its sheer volume was the next order of business.
Alternate-side parking rules were suspended through Friday, and Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents to stay off the streets and leave cars parked to help speed snow removal efforts. Schools will be open Monday, he said, and sanitation crews were pressed to get roads prepared for school buses to begin their early morning routes. De Blasio said he hoped higher temperatures expected this week would also help clear the snow.
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At 7 a.m. on Sunday, a travel ban imposed by New York state and city officials on Saturday afternoon was lifted. Tunnels and bridges into the city, all of which had been closed during the storm, reopened as well, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Service had been suspended during the storm on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad, as well as the aboveground routes of the subway and the Staten Island Railway. Also at 7 a.m., some Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses began rolling again.
Snow stopped falling around 10 p.m. on Saturday, leaving a total of 26.8 inches in Central Park, according to the National Weather Service, the second-highest amount recorded since 1869.
At Kennedy International Airport in Queens, 30.5 inches was reported. Crews worked overnight to clear runways though with thousands of flights canceled regionally, service had not yet been restored. Cuomo said Saturday that “the vast majority’’ of flights would be canceled Sunday.
The city’s snowfall was still less than that of parts of Maryland and West Virginia, where in some parts 40 inches had fallen. The storm which caused more than 10 states on the Eastern Seaboard to declare states of emergency, killed 18 on Saturday, according to The Associated Press. Several of the people, including a 94-year-old man in Smithtown on Long Island, appeared to have died while clearing snow, according to news reports.
On Manhattan streets after the snow stopped falling, couples strolled along the middle of Avenue of the Americas in the West Village on Saturday night. Times Square seemed sleepy; all Broadway shows had been canceled Saturday, according to the Broadway League. In Herald Square, people made snow angels in the middle of 34th Street and uploaded photos of them to social media. Yet even with the snowfall over, it seemed few were budging from being indoors — a stream of deliverymen skidded their bikes through the night in wheel-high snow.
A man sits by an ice covered lake in Central Park in New York City on Sunday.
The great dig-out began early Sunday under a bright, almost-full moon. The usual rumble of traffic was replaced with a silence punctuated in places with the scraping sounds of a few people with snow shovels.
In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an hour before sunrise, Remer Lemus, 35, shoveled out the first of seven apartment building walkways he had to clear. He said he would spend half his day excavating as much snow as he could, and then the second half returning to do “detail’’ snow work, like around the edges of stairwells and sidewalks.
“We haven’t seen snow this season and we got this storm,’’ he said. “It’s a lot of snow.’’
Passers-by walked in the street, cleared in points by snowplows down to bare blacktop, rather than try the thickly covered sidewalk. Despite the ban on non-emergency or sanitation traffic until 7 a.m. Sunday, Albert Cepeda, 37, drove a gray delivery van at 5:30 a.m. along Bedford Avenue that was filled with fresh bread from the bakery for which he works. “We have to work,’’ he said. “If our bakery doesn’t work we have a problem.’’ He added that the main streets were easy enough to drive down, but on secondary streets the drifts made for white-knuckled driving. “It’s impossible,’’ he said.
The storm — blustery in some places, blinding in others — was a swirling, sprawling mass with a reach of nearly 1,000 miles from the Gulf Coast to New England. It flooded low-lying beaches and brought down trees and power lines, leaving thousands without electricity. The storm also glazed roads and varnished trees as it pummeled the Mid-Atlantic region with destructive force.
As the Washington region transitioned from blizzard mode to cleanup mode, residential neighborhoods in the northwestern part of the city and Maryland suburbs were buried under 2 feet of snow, and many streets had not yet been plowed. Two major highways in Maryland — Interstates 70 and 270 — that were closed overnight by Gov. Larry Hogan reopened early Sunday.
Runways at both Washington airports — Reagan National and Dulles International — remained closed; Dulles, in suburban Virginia, recorded nearly 30 inches of snow, making the blizzard the second snowiest storm on record there. The Metro — the Washington region’s subway and bus mass transit system — was not expected to resume service until Monday.
Even escalators under protected Metro canopies were blanketed in white. But a lively snowball fight — a snowstorm tradition in the city’s Dupont Circle neighborhood — was underway Sunday morning.
The ocean poured into shore towns in southern New Jersey: In Sea Isle City, floodwaters laden with chunks of ice surged down the streets, and in Wildwood the frigid, brackish water submerged cars halfway up to their windows. In Belmar, the wind drove a sailboat out of its marina and tangled its mast in overhead wires, knocking out power.
A for rent sign is submerged on flooded streets in Wildwood, N.J., on Saturday.
The disruptions extended to the presidential campaign trail, forcing New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who is seeking the Republican nomination, to forfeit time in New Hampshire to tend to his state. He turned the setback into a selling point for his candidacy in an appearance Sunday morning on CNN, where he pointed to his management of the heavy snowfall as proof of his readiness for the White House.
“What you see in New Jersey today are results,’’ Christie said in an appearance from his hometown, Mendham, New Jersey. “And that’s why the people of the United States should strongly consider supporting me for president of the United States, because when the chips are down, I deliver.’’
One of the 18 people who died in the storm was a good Samaritan who was shot on the side of a North Carolina highway when he stopped to help a stranded motorist who became belligerent, according to a report in The Charlotte Observer.
But most of the storm’s victims died while attempting to drive on icy highways or shovel snow in the punishing winds. By 4 a.m., the New York Police Department had responded to 401 accidents and towed 367 vehicles, a spokesman said. Three of those who died while shoveling were New Yorkers — men aged 67, 78 and 80 — in Queens and Staten Island, the authorities said. Two more were on Long Island, a 61-year-old man in West Hempstead and the 94-year-old man in Smithtown, whose body was found next to a snow blower, the authorities said.
A sixth shoveling death occurred in Maryland, where a 60-year-old man died of a heart attack on Saturday, said a spokesman for the Prince George’s County Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department.
A man and woman walk through the Bushwick neighborhood of New York on Saturday night.
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