BOSTON — A howling blizzard with gusts over 70 mph heaped snow on Boston along with other stretches of New England and Long Island on Tuesday but failed to live up to the hype in Philadelphia and New York City, where buses and subways started rolling again in the morning.
In New England, the storm that arrived Monday evening was a bitter, paralyzing blast, while in the New York metro area, it was a bust that left forecasters apologizing and politicians defending their near-total shutdown on travel.
Some residents grumbled, but others sounded a better-safe-than-sorry note and even expressed sympathy for the weatherman.
At least 2 feet of snow was expected in most of Massachusetts, potentially making it one of the top snowstorms of all time. The National Weather Service said a 78 mph gust was reported on Nantucket, and a 72 mph one on Martha's Vineyard.
"It felt like sand hitting you in the face," Bob Paglia said after walking his dog four times overnight in Whitman, a small town about 20 miles south of Boston.
Maureen Keller, who works at Gurney's, an oceanfront resort in Montauk, N.Y., on the tip of Long Island, said: "It feels like a hurricane with snow."
As of midmorning, the Boston area had 1½ feet of snow, while the far eastern tip of Long Island had more than 2 feet. Snowplows around New England struggled to keep up.
"At 4 o'clock this morning, it was the worst I've ever seen it," said Larry Messier, a snowplow operator in Columbia, Connecticut. "You could plow, and then five minutes later you'd have to plow again."
In Boston, police drove several dozen doctors and nurses to work at hospitals. Snow blanketed Boston Common, and drifts piled up against historic Faneuil Hall, where Samuel Adams and the Sons of Liberty stoked the fires of rebellion. Adjacent Quincy Market, usually bustling with tourists, was populated only by a few city workers clearing snow from the cobblestones.
As the storm pushed into the Northeast on Monday, the region came to a near standstill, alarmed by forecasters' dire predictions. More than 7,700 flights were canceled, and schools, businesses and government offices closed.
But as the storm pushed northward, it tracked farther east than forecasters had been expecting, and conditions improved quickly in its wake. By midmorning Tuesday, New Jersey and New York City lifted driving bans, and subways and trains started up again, with a return to a full schedule expected Wednesday.
While Philadelphia, New York and New Jersey had braced for a foot or two of snow from what forecasters warned could be a storm of potentially historic proportions, they got far less than that. New York City received about 8 inches, Philadelphia a mere inch or so. New Jersey got up to 8 inches.
