25 January 2015

‘Paralyzing’ blizzard


Alastair Jamieson has a Time article via an NBC News article by M. Alex Johnson and Elisha Fieldstadt about yet more (ugh) winter:
The New York City area was placed under a blizzard warning beginning Monday afternoon, with as much as three feet of snow expected to create "paralyzing, crippling" conditions, forecasters said. It's part of a storm system that meteorologists said will pummel the Northeast from Philadelphia all the way to northern New England with potentially "historic" snow accumulations well into Tuesday night.
The worst of it will be late Monday through Tuesday night, with blizzard conditions, possible airport closings and major flight delays, damaging wind gusts, and possible coastal flooding, the National Weather Service warned. The nation's largest city was put under an extraordinarily long blizzard warning, stretching from 1 pm Monday to midnight Tuesday.
The forecast means New York City could easily smash its one-day snowfall record of twenty-seven inches, recorded in Central Park in February of 2006.
"Very highly populated areas of the Northeast are going to get crushed with snow," said Tom Moore, coordinating meteorologist for The Weather Channel. "Everywhere is going to get get hit very hard by this storm."
"This could be the biggest snowstorm in the history of this city," Mayor Bill de Blasio told reporters on Sunday. "My message for New Yorkers is: prepare for something worse than we have ever seen before."
"This is going to be a big one, historic," Moore said. "There could be paralyzing, crippling blizzard conditions." Moore said travel would be "dangerous, if not impossible." Many airlines declared winter weather waivers, allowing passengers in the Northeast to change itineraries without a fee. Moore said New England was "going to take a big hit, for sure," with the storm intensifying "into a monster" as it moves northeastward Monday.
Massachusetts was also bracing for winds that could reach seventy mph in coastal areas, which, paired with the falling snow, will create whiteout conditions. That will likely mean some time off for hundreds of thousands of workers.
"Now it's going to all come. February is a snow month, and I can't wait," Debora Labonte of Chicopee, Massachusetts, told NBC station WWLP of Springfield. "I went to the grocery store and picked up a few items, getting ready to maybe stay home from work."
The forecast came after millions of Americans across the Northeast awoke Saturday to a blanket of snow that was later doused with rain, leaving New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania in a sloppy mess.
The New Jersey State Police reported 126 traffic accidents, and a parking garage in Secaucus collapsed under the weight of the snow and a plow, police said. The plow's driver suffered minor injuries in the accident, which created a hole fifty feet by fifty feet, NBC New York said.
A Nor'easter delivered more than five inches of snow in New York City, while residents of northern New York were digging out of as much as nine inches, NBC New York reported. Saturday's storm was the first significant snowfall in the New York City area this winter. Scott Flath, general manager of Long Island Hardware in Bohemia, New York, said his store is well-stocked, but that many of his customers are making their first winter supply runs of the season. He said they're telling him things like: "I have no idea where my shovel from last year is."
Rico says that winter sucks, and this will be no exception...

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