NEW YORK — A blizzard with hurricane-force winds brought much of the East Coast to a standstill Saturday, piling up more than 2 feet of snow, stranding travelers and shutting down the nation’s capital, New York City and other cities in the region.
Flood warnings were issued for coastal regions in New Jersey. More than 182,000 electrical customers had lost power by Saturday evening.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo banned travel Saturday afternoon in New York City, including subway service, and by evening Baltimore’s mayor had closed that city’s roads to all nonemergency vehicles until 6 a.m. today.
Maryland’s governor closed a stretch of interstate west of Baltimore. In Washington, D.C., the mayor urged people to stay home and off the city streets. All mass transit in the capital is shut down through today.
At least 18 deaths have been blamed on the weather. Most were traffic fatalities, but several people died while shoveling snow or from hypothermia.
As of 7 p.m. Saturday, New York City had more than 25 inches of snow on the ground, nearing the record of 26.9 inches set in February 2006.
“This is very likely one of the worst storms in our history,” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said in a Saturday news briefing at the Office of Emergency Management in Brooklyn. “Don’t go out — or go out very briefly — and watch your kids carefully,” he said.
The city’s normally bustling streets around Rockefeller Center, Penn Station and other landmarks were mostly empty Saturday evening. Those who did venture out walked in the middle of snow-covered streets to avoid deep drifts on the sidewalks.
Broadway shows were canceled Saturday afternoon and evening, and Times Square was all but deserted.
Cuomo’s travel ban Saturday included commuter rails, aboveground segments of the nation’s biggest subway system, and city bus service.
“Plows cannot keep up with snowfall at a certain rate. That is a situation that is now occurring,” Cuomo said on Twitter early Saturday afternoon. Earlier in the day he had declared a state of emergency for New York City and surrounding areas.
Cuomo said Saturday night that he expected to lift the travel ban by 7 a.m. today. He said officials will announce by 6 a.m. whether aboveground subway service will resume.
In Washington, snow piling up on national monuments was unmarred by footprints. The steps of the Lincoln Memorial looked much like a ski slope. Snow seemed to add to the misery in the faces of the statue soldiers in the Korean War Veterans Memorial.
On an average day, visitors can see from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, but not Saturday. There was 30 inches of snow on the ground there by Saturday afternoon, and wind gusts swirled falling snow into nearly whiteout conditions.
Late Saturday, Baltimore’s Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said only police cruisers, firetrucks, ambulances, snowplows and utility repair trucks would be allowed on the streets until 6 a.m. today. She added that the travel ban could be extended if conditions warrant.
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan ordered the closure Saturday night of the entire length of Interstates 270 and 70 from Interstate 81 in Washington County to Interstate 695, also known as the Baltimore Beltway. The highways were to remain closed until 7 a.m. today to all motorists except emergency personnel after snow-related traffic accidents involving several tractor trailers and other vehicles on both interstates.
Hogan urged Marylanders to stay off every road in the state. He said, “Stay safe and stay at home while crews do their jobs.”
Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser also told people to stay home so street crews could clear the growing piles of snow. “There are too many people on the streets, both driving and walking,” Bowser said in a briefing Saturday. “We are still very much in our emergency response phase. Please stay home.”
By 1 p.m., more than 1,300 people were crowded into shelters in the capital city, up from less than 400 at 9 a.m., city spokesman Dora Taylor said in an email. The National Guard was working with city authorities to deliver food to shelters.
Meteorologists warned that the storm would stretch into today.
“This is going to be one of those generational events, where your parents talk about how bad it was,” Ryan Maue, a meteorologist for WeatherBell Analytics, said from Tallahassee, Fla., which also saw some snowflakes.
Faye Barthold, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service’s New York area office, called the storm system “clearly significant. … You don’t typically get 3-inch-an-hour snowfall rates, but this system is so dynamic and has all that energy.”
The system stretched from the Gulf Coast to New England.
By afternoon Saturday, the highest unofficial report of snowfall was in a rural area of West Virginia, not far from Harper’s Ferry, with 40 inches.
Besides snow and wind, the National Weather Service also predicted up to a half-inch of ice in the Carolinas.
The Washington area was mostly spared power failures Saturday. Not so for New York businesses and homes, which were among the roughly 182,000 without service as of 4 p.m. Saturday. Cuomo said most of the New York failures were on Long Island.
Saturday’s storm system is the same one that earlier dumped snow in Arkansas and other Southern states before it headed northeast. It left parts of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Kentucky coated in ice.
As it hit, hundreds of vehicles skidded off icy roads in accidents, some which were fatal. Those killed included a 4-yearold boy in North Carolina; a Kentucky transportation worker who was plowing highways; and a woman whose car plunged down a 300-foot embankment in Tennessee.
An Ohio teenager sledding behind an all-terrain vehicle was hit by a truck and killed, and two people died of hypothermia in southwest Virginia.
In North Carolina, a man whose car had veered off an ice-covered road was arrested, accused of killing a motorist who had stopped to help him.
In Pennsylvania, the Temple University women’s gymnastics team, the Duquesne University’s men’s basketball team and a church group from Indiana were among travelers whose vehicles became stuck on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
National Guard members and front-end loaders worked to help dig vehicles out Saturday. The gymnastic and basketball teams said their buses were freed Saturday night. Duquesne officials said 15 basketball players, coaches and support staff members helped push their bus through the snow.
Overnight Friday, hundreds of drivers were stranded in Kentucky on a stretch of Interstate 75 south of Lexington, where accidents and blowing snow stopped traffic. Road crews provided snacks, fuel and water as they worked to move the cars one by one.
From Virginia to New York, sustained winds topped 30 mph and gusted to around 50 mph. The wind was so strong that scientists reported trouble measuring the snow that sometimes blew sideways. Winds at Dewey Beach, Del., and Langley Air Force Base, Va., reached 75 mph, the weather service said.
The possibility of flooding was worrisome. “Between the snow and the flooding, personally, I’m more worried about the flooding,” Cuomo said late Friday.
The storm grounded planes in the Northeast and across the nation, and some 10,246 flights have already been canceled in the U.S. through Monday, according to Houston-based FlightAware.
Most of Saturday’s scrubbed flights were from the New York area’s three large airports. Runways also were closed at the three major Washington-area airports.
The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which oversees Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport and Washington Dulles International Airport, said Saturday evening in a statement that it is unlikely that normal flight operations would resume today.
The authority said continued significant snowfall and high winds were making snow removal on the runways, roadways and parking lots difficult. Nearly 30 inches of snow had reportedly fallen at Dulles as of 8 p.m.
At Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, most flights Saturday were canceled or delayed. Flights at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina resumed Saturday about noon Eastern time with plans to have limited operations for most of the day.
Among those whose travel was disrupted was Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, whose high-tech aircraft — known as the Doomsday Plane — couldn’t land at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland after returning from Europe. Carter was rerouted to Tampa, Fla., where he planned to wait for better weather.
In Arkansas on Saturday some flights were canceled at Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field in Little Rock and Northwest Arkansas Regional Airport in Highfill.
At Clinton National, Delta Air Lines canceled two flights to Atlanta and American Airlines canceled one flight to Charlotte. Two American Airlines flights to Little Rock from Charlotte were canceled, one Delta flight to Little Rock from Atlanta was canceled. Also, one Delta flight from Atlanta was delayed three hours.
Airport spokesman Shane Carter said Saturday afternoon that American Airlines was planning to fly to Little Rock from Charlotte later in the evening.
At the Highfill airport, one American Airlines flight to Charlotte was canceled and a Delta flight to Atlanta was delayed more than two hours. Two American Airlines flights from Charlotte to Highfill were canceled, and a Delta flight from Atlanta was delayed three hours.
Yet, with all of the problems, there were bright spots.
Saturday morning, the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington posted on its Facebook page and on Twitter a video of one of its four pandas frolicking in the snow.
Tian Tian, its 18-year-old, 264-pound panda, is shown rolling in the snow, throwing it on himself and lying on his back almost as if he’s making a snow angel. The caption on the video reads: “Tian Tian woke up this morning to a lot of snow, and he was pretty excited about it.”
By 1 p.m. Saturday, the video had been viewed 7.5 million times on Facebook and shared more than 440,000 times. It had been re-Tweeted about 80,000 times.
Information for this article was contributed by Seth Borenstein, Jennifer Peltz, Scott Mayerowitz, Alex Brandon, Lolita C. Baldor, Jessica Gresko, Juliet Linderman, Adrian Sainz, Claire Garofalo and John Raby of The Associated Press; by Brian K. Sullivan, Jim Polson, Henry Goldman, Maggie Otte, Kasia Klimasinska, Mary Schlangenstein, Brendan Case and Kiel Porter of Bloomberg News; by James Barron and Rick Rojas of The New York Times; by Niraj Chokshi, Peter Hermann, Michael E. Ruane and Shawn Boburg of The Washington Post; and by Emily Walkenhorst of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
A Section on 01/24/2016