East Coast blizzard

Time has an article by Michael R. Sisak and Verena Dobnik about the recent East Coast storm:

 

East Coast residents who made the most of a paralyzing weekend blizzard faced fresh challenges as the workweek began: slippery roads, spotty transit service, and mounds of snow that buried cars and blocked sidewalk entrances.
For many, the weekend extended into Monday because of closed schools and government offices. Officials were cautioning against unnecessary driving and expected some commuter trains to be delayed or canceled.
The storm dropped snow from the Gulf Coast to New England, with near-record snowfalls tallied from Washington, DC to New York City. At least thirty deaths were blamed on the weather, with shoveling snow and breathing carbon monoxide together claiming almost as many lives as car crashes.
The snow began Friday, and the last flakes fell just before midnight Saturday. In its aftermath, crews raced all day Sunday to clear streets and sidewalks devoid of their usual bustle. Sunday’s brilliant sunshine and gently rising temperatures provided a respite from the blizzard that dropped a record thirty inches on Baltimore, Maryland. The weekend timing could not have been better, enabling many to enjoy a gorgeous winter day.
It was just right for a huge snowball fight in Baltimore, where more than six hundred people responded to organizer Aaron Brazell’s invitation on Facebook. “I knew people would be cooped up in their houses and wanting to come outside,” said Brazell, who was beaned by multiple blasts of perfectly soft but firm snow.
But one day of sunshine wasn’t enough to clear many roads. Cars parked in neighborhoods were encased in snow, some of it pushed from the streets by plows. In downtown Philadelphia, some sidewalk entrances were blocked by mounds of snow.
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio encouraged people to leave their plowed-in cars all week after a one-day record of two feet of snow fell in Central Park.
That advice came too late for Bob Raldiris, who tried shoveling his Nissan Maxima out of a spot in Ridgewood in Queens, before passing plows and trucks spoiled his labor. “This is terrible,” he said, pointing to a pile of snow three feet high.
Federal offices will be closed Monday, and Virginia’s state workers were told to stay home. Schools from Washington to the Jersey Shore gave students Monday off; In the DC suburbs, classes also were canceled for Tuesday.
New York City’s transit authority said almost all mass transit services will be running in time for the Monday morning rush hour, including nearly eighty percent of the Long Island Railroad.
Broadway reopened after going dark at the last minute during the snowstorm, but museums remained closed in Washington, and the House of Representatives postponed votes until February, citing the storm’s impact on travel.
Flying remained particularly messy after nearly twelve thousand weekend flights were canceled. Airports resumed limited service in New York City, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, which got an entire winter’s snow in two days. Washington-area airports remained closed Sunday.
Major airlines also canceled hundreds of flights for Monday. Along with clearing snow and ice from facilities and equipment, the operators of airlines, train, and transit systems had to figure out how to get snowbound employees to work.
Amtrak operated a reduced number of trains on all its routes, serving many people who couldn’t get around otherwise, spokesman Marc Magliari said. But bus and rail service was expected to be limited around the region into Monday.
Overall snowfall of nearly thirty inches in Central Park made it New York City’s second biggest winter storm since records began in 1869, and Saturday’s snowfall made for a single-day record in the city.
Some of the blizzard’s heaviest snow bands wound up over New York City and Long Island, sending snow totals spiking higher than the twelve to eighteen inches forecasters had predicted Thursday.
“Just about everybody was expecting a strong storm system,” National Weather Service meteorologist Peter Wichrowski said Sunday. “The question always was just how heavy was the precipitation going to be?”
Washington’s records were less clear. The official three-day total of eighteen inches measured at Reagan National Airport was impossibly short of accumulations recorded elsewhere in the city. An official total of twenty-plus inches landed at the National Zoo, for example.

The zoo remained closed through Monday, but a video (above) of its giant panda Tian Tian making snow angels got nearly fifty million views. Joining the fun, Jeffrey Perez, of Millersville, Maryland, climbed into a panda suit and rolled around in the snow, snagging more than half a million views of his own.
Mother Nature was less deadly this time than human nature. A beloved Capitol policeman joined a grim list of people suffering heart attacks while shoveling snow. And a growing number of people died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
In Passaic, New Jersey, on Sunday, a mother and year-old son watching their family shovel snow from the apparent safety of their car died because snow blocked the tailpipe; her three-year-old daughter was in critical condition. A man who tried to shovel out his car in Muhlenberg Township in Pennsylvania, met a similar fate after a snowplow buried him inside. And an elderly couple in Greenville, South Carolina, was poisoned by the generator in their garage after losing power.
Roofs collapsed on a Pennsylvania church, a Virginia theater, and a barn outside Frederick, Maryland, which got over thirty inches of snow, killing some cows. Douglas Fink felt terrible about that: “I was trying to protect them, but they probably would have been better off just standing outside.”

Rico says he loathes winter, and this one made his shit list (except for the panda, of course)...