East Coast digs out from yet more snow
Associated Press
NEW YORK
Enough already.
People across the Northeast wearily shoveled their sidewalks and dug out their cars — again — after getting clobbered by the latest in a seemingly never-ending string of snowstorms, this one an overachieving mess that packed more punch than anyone expected.
“I’ve lived in New York 70 years, and this year is the worst I remember,” said Lenny Eitelberg, 77. “It’s the continuity of it. It just keeps coming. Every week there’s something new to be worried about. It’s almost become comical.”
In the Washington area, up to 7 inches of snow renewed memories of last year’s “snowpocalypse” and created chaos when it hit the nation’s capital at the height of the evening rush hour Wednesday, forcing commuters into treacherous, eight-hour drives home. Even the president got caught in traffic.
New Yorkers, keeping close watch on the cleanup after a post-Christmas blizzard paralyzed the city for days, had it a little easier this time. The heaviest snow arrived overnight, when there weren’t many cars and buses around to get stuck.
The forecast had called for up to a foot of snow, but the storm brought far more than that. New York got 19 inches, Philadelphia 17. Boston got about a foot, as expected. Many schools closed for a second day Thursday. Airports ground to a halt, and nearly a half-million people lost power at some point.
Washington-area residents, who largely had been spared heavy snow this winter after getting buried by a series of storms last year, lamented this year’s encore. Around 300,000 people lost power, and motorists abandoned cars by the hundreds when pressing on proved fruitless.
In Maryland, jackknifed tractor-trailers and other stuck vehicles blocked roads and impeded snowplows.
“That’s the nightmarish situation that we’ve been dealing with as quickly as we can,” Gov. Martin O’Malley said.
After arriving Wednesday night in Washington from Manitowoc, Wis., President Barack Obama couldn’t fly on the helicopter that normally takes him to the White House from a nearby military base. Instead, a motorcade had to snake through the crippled rush-hour traffic.
The federal government let 300,000 Washington- area employees go home two hours early Wednesday, sending them straight into the teeth of the late- afternoon storm. Many people took more than eight hours to get home.
New York City typically gets 21 inches of snow a winter. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the latest storm makes this January the snowiest since the city started keeping records, breaking the mark of 27.4 inches set in 1925. The New York area has been hit with snow eight times since mid-December.