Whatever name you prefer, one thing was clear: Saturday’s snow storm on the East Coast of the United States was massive.
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Snow stopped falling in New York City shortly after 10 p.m. Saturday. A spokeswoman for the New York Stock Exchange said the market planned to open as usual on Monday. In the capital, it brought heavy snowfall, high winds and treacherous conditions. Cars parked in neighborhoods were encased in snow, some of it pushed from the streets by plows.
Sunday’s brilliant sunshine and gently rising temperatures provided a respite from the blizzard that paralyzed Washington and dropped a record 29.2 inches on Baltimore.
At Meridian Park in the city’s northwest, locals organized the Snowzilla snowball fight between the Polar Bears and the American Bald Eagles, before participants were invited to head to a local bar for an all-day happy hour.
The storm likely caused billions of dollars in economic losses, including damage to buildings and lost business from closures, reinsurance broker Aon Benfield said yesterday.
At least 18 deaths were linked to the storm, according to the Associated Press, including three men in the NY boroughs of Queens and Staten Island who died shoveling snow.
But one day of sunshine wasn’t enough to clear many other roads.
The House of Representatives opted also to remain out of session for the coming week due to the severity of the winter storm and related travel woes – with no votes set until February 1.
Almost 12,000 flights were canceled from Friday through Monday as states from New England to North Carolina wrestled with the massive snow dump. Airports resumed limited service in New York City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, which said it got an entire winter’s snow in two days.
Major airlines also cancelled hundreds of flights for Monday. Some did not have a choice; ploughs clearing streets buried cars under a mound of ice and snow. “We’re going to continue to work to clear the runways we’ll re-evaluate the conditions both of the runways and the rest of the roadways and parking lots as the day goes on and hopefully be able to make a determination as to when we can get flights back in and out in the very near future”.
In New York, trains started running out of Grand Central Terminal but service on the Long Island Rail Road – the nation’s busiest commuter rail service – was still suspended.
A resident shovels snow away from the entrance to his home in Union City, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from Midtown Manhattan, after the second-biggest winter storm in NY history, January 24, 2016. Much of the northeast was expected to see a mix of sun and clouds on Sunday with temperatures just above freezing. “The question always was, just how heavy was the precipitation going to be?” The official three-day total of 17.8 inches measured at Reagan National Airport was impossibly short of accumulations recorded elsewhere in the D.C. area. An official total of 22.4 inches landed at the National Zoo, for example.
Joining the fun, Jeffrey Perez got more than half a million views of his own online video, after climbing into a panda suit and rolling around in the snow outside his home in Millersville, Maryland. Numerous deaths had more to do with human nature than Mother Nature. A beloved Capitol policeman joined a grim list of people suffering heart attacks while shoveling snow.
Despite the travel bans and warning some people made a good time of the storm, combining skiing and snowboarding into a form of skitching – hitching on cars in skis. And a growing number of people died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
The water in Wildwood, N.J., is so high in some places cars can’t get through.
On the New Jersey shore, a region hard-hit in 2012 by Superstorm Sandy, the storm’s high tides drove floods inland.
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