Huge blizzard rages in U.S. Northeast

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This article was published 09/02/2013 (5001 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A storm forecasters warned could be a blizzard for the history books began clobbering the New York-to-Boston corridor on Friday, grounding flights, closing workplaces and sending people rushing to get home ahead of a possible 30 to 90 centimetres of snow.

From New Jersey to Maine, shoppers crowded into supermarkets and hardware stores to buy food, snow shovels, flashlights and generators, things that became precious commodities after superstorm Sandy in October. Others gassed up their cars, another lesson learned after Sandy. Across much of New England, schools closed ahead of the snow.

“This is a storm of major proportions,” Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said. “Stay off the roads. Stay home.”

By Friday evening, Boston had just six cm of snow and New York City had five, but parts of southeastern Massachusetts had more than 15 cm and central Rhode Island had more than 20 cm. The National Weather Service warned the worst was still to come.

The wind-whipped snowstorm mercifully arrived at the start of a weekend, which meant fewer cars on the road and extra time for sanitation crews to clear the mess before commuters in the New York-to-Boston region of roughly 25 million people have to go back to work. But it could also mean a weekend cooped up indoors.

Rainy Neves, a mother of two in Cambridge, just west of Boston, did some last-minute shopping at a grocery store, filling her cart to the brim.

“Honestly, a lot of junk — a lot of quick things you can make just in case lights go out, a lot of snacks to keep the kids busy while they’d be inside during the storm, things to sip with my friends, things for movies,” she said. “Just a whole bunch of things to keep us entertained.”

In heavily Catholic Boston, the archdiocese urged parishioners to be prudent about attending Sunday mass and reminded them that, under church law, the obligation “does not apply when there is grave difficulty in fulfilling this obligation.”

Halfway through what had been a mild winter across the Northeast, blizzard warnings were posted from parts of New Jersey to Maine. The National Weather Service said Boston could get close to 90 cm of snow by tonight.

By Friday evening, the New York-to-Boston corridor was experiencing blizzard-like conditions, with blowing, swirling snow and freezing rain. Early snowfall was blamed for a 19-car pileup in Cumberland, Maine, that caused minor injuries. In Rhode Island, 34,000 homes and businesses lost power.

Forecasters said wind gusts up to 120 km/h could cause more widespread power outages and whip the snow into fearsome drifts. Flooding was expected along coastal areas still recovering from superstorm Sandy, which hit New York and New Jersey the hardest and is considered Jersey’s worst natural disaster.

Meteorologist Jeff Masters, of Weather Underground, said the winter storm was a collision of two storms and may end up among the Boston area’s Top 5 most intense.

“When you add two respectable storms together, you’re going to get a knockout punch with this one,” he said.

It could break Boston’s all-time snowstorm record of 70 cm, set in 2003.

Masters said the region could get a break from warmer air trailing behind that is expected to push temperatures up to 5 C by Monday.

“It’s going to be not that difficult to dig out, compared to maybe some other nor’easters in the past.”

— The Associated Press