Northeast digs out; cold moves in

NYC mayor hears grumbling over snow-covered streets

Snow covers a statue of Horace Greeley on Wednesday in New York’s City Hall Park.
Snow covers a statue of Horace Greeley on Wednesday in New York’s City Hall Park.

NEW YORK - Northeasterners scraped and shoveled Wednesday after a snowstorm grounded flights, shuttered schools and buried roads in a surprising amount of snow, leaving biting cold in its wake.

The storm stretched from Kentucky to New England but hit hardest along the heavily populated Interstate 95 corridor between Philadelphia and Boston. As much as 14 inches of snow fell in Philadelphia, with New York City seeing almost as much, before tapering off. Temperatures were in the single digits in many places Wednesday and were not expected to rise out of the teens.

The atmosphere was particularly frosty in New York, where some residents complained that plowing was spotty and schools were open while children elsewhere in the region stayed home.

The city’s sanitation commissioner, John Doherty, said the cleanup effort was equitable and robust, though complicated by traffic and the storm’s timetable. Those factors made it difficult to plow and spread salt, Doherty said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio said “the overall storm response across the city was well-executed.” But he said in a statement Wednesday evening that he felt “more could have been done to serve the Upper East Side.”

De Blasio, a Brooklyn resident who campaigned on closing gaps between rich and poor city residents, also was asked why some Manhattan avenues, including in the wealthy Upper East Side neighborhood, still were covered in snow when a Brooklyn thoroughfare was plowed clear to the pavement.

The plowing problems combined with a late-night decision to keep open the nation’s largest public schools system had some parents grumbling.

De Blasio said Wednesday evening that 30 more vehicles and nearly 40 more sanitation workers were sent to the area to finish the cleanup.

One parent, Pamela Murphy Jennings, said her two children navigated snowy sections of Madison and Park avenues to get to their public schools on the Upper East Side.

“Children have to walk to city bus stops and cross these streets to get here,” she said. “Cars are sliding on roads. If there was any day to close schools, this was the day.”

Schoolchildren had the day off in Boston, Philadelphia, many parts of Rhode Island, Connecticut, upstate New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, northern Virginia and the District of Columbia. Federal workers in Washington got a two hour delay in their workdays Wednesday after a day off Tuesday because of the snow.

De Blasio said officials made the right call in anticipating that streets would be passable enough for students to get to school safely, adding that his own teenage son had gone to school.

Citywide, all of the primary streets were plowed by 6 a.m. Wednesday, along with 90 percent or more of other streets, Doherty said.

Some residents were understanding. Upper East Side resident Lou Riccio agreed that cleanup was a problem in his neighborhood, but he didn’t see it as the mayor’s fault.

“It was just the problem of a bad snowstorm coming at a bad time of the day,” said Riccio, who teaches public affairs at Columbia University.

The storm was blamed for at least one death - a driver was thrown from a car that fishtailed into the path of a tractor-trailer on a snow-covered Maryland road Tuesday.

Authorities also were investigating three suspected weather-related deaths in Pennsylvania’s Delaware County, outside Philadelphia. A preliminary investigation showed that weather conditions played a role in a two-vehicle crash that killed two people in Prince George’s County, Md., and police said the storm may have been a factor in a deadly tractor-trailer wreck in Frederick County, Va.

About 1,400 flights were canceled Wednesday into and out of some of the nation’s busiest airports, including in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston, according to Flightaware. That was down from about 3,000 flights the day before.

While Boston got only about 4 inches of snow, other parts of Massachusetts received as much as 18 inches.

On Cape Cod, a blizzard warning in effect through Wednesday afternoon kept business brisk at Aubuchon Hardware in Sandwich, where salt and snow shovels were popular purchases.

“The flow of customers is pretty steady, but everyone waits until the worst of the storm to start worrying,” manager Jeff Butland said.

Information for this article was contributed by Karen Matthews, Verena Dobnik,Ted Shaffrey, Nick Tabor, Samantha Henry, Ron Todt and Denise Lavoie of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 01/23/2014

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