Flights grounded, workers told to stay at home as storm slams US
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A deadly winter storm moved north along the east coast of the United States yesterday, bringing heavy snow, sleet and rain across the Washington, DC and New York areas, grounding flights and shutting government offices.
Hundreds of thousands of people were without power in the southeast, a day after the storm arrived bringing heavy ice accumulations that downed electric lines and made driving treacherous.
The Washington, DC area awoke to its heaviest snowfall of the winter. The federal government was closed, along with school districts in the area. Its bus service was suspended and residents were advised to stay home if possible rather than risk a commute through snow accumulations of as much as a foot throughout the area.
In Connecticut, Governor Dannel Malloy ordered non-essential workers to stay home yesterday.
The northeast has endured a series of winter storms this year, straining city and state budgets for snow removal as plow crews rack up overtime and inventories of salt for keeping roads clear of ice grow thin.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio raised the city’s expected winter weather budget by 60 percent to US$92 million, funding that will go toward supplies, maintenance, equipment repairs, salt and fuel.
The city’s sanitation department had called on reinforcement crews who are paid an hourly wage to help shovel out sidewalks, fire hydrants and other snow-blocked areas.
“Snow laborers help us in bigger storms, concentrating on areas where people are walking, hydrants. Areas where vehicle equipment can’t reach,” Belinda Mager, a department spokeswoman, said.
The city’s public schools remained open, which came as a relief for one New Yorker, Lori Hiller, an elementary school social worker in Brooklyn who has two children in high school.
“We live in New York. It’s February. There would be no reason to close schools,” Hiller said.
Winter storm warnings were in effect from North Carolina to Maine, with the National Weather Service warning of “hazardous” road conditions throughout the region. As much as 20 centimeters was forecast to fall from eastern Pennsylvania to Maine, with accumulations reaching 30cm in places.
A total of 5,066 domestic flights were canceled and more than 630 were delayed yesterday, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.com.
The storm system, which has dumped heavy snow, sleet and freezing rain from eastern Texas to the Carolinas since Tuesday, was blamed for at least 13 deaths in the South and for knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of customers.
An ice storm warning was in effect for parts of central Georgia yesterday morning, after about 2.5cm of ice had accumulated there and into South Carolina.
Nearly 230,000 Georgia Power customers were without electricity yesterday morning, with half of the outages reported in the Augusta area.
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