Residents of the US East Coast began digging up from under a thick blanket of snow yesterday after a record-breaking blizzard paralyzed Washington and the region, snapping power to 350,000 residents and killing two people.
The monster storm stretched more than 1,000km from eastern Indiana across into New Jersey and as far south as North Carolina, affecting tens of millions of Americans.
With winds gusting at almost 90km an hour, meteorologists said they had recorded snowfall as high as 96cm near Baltimore, Maryland — a record.
The heavy, sticky snow toppled trees and snapped power lines, leaving more than 350,000 people without electricity in Maryland and neighboring Virginia.
“Snowmageddon here in DC,” US President Barack Obama told Democrats in a speech, only a year after chiding the capital for over-responding to small snowfalls.
The National Weather Service put the Washington-Baltimore metropolitan area under a rare 24-hour blizzard warning until 10pm on Saturday.
Forecasters warned residents to hunker down, with no let-up in the weather for most of the day, and said chilly temperatures yesterday would mean the wet snow would swiftly turn icy.
“Officially this won’t break records in DC, but unofficially, you bet it will,” Paul Kochin, an expert in northeast weather systems, told reporters.
“It’s very rare to have two such big storms in one season,” he said, after the capital region was already crippled by a smaller but still massive storm in December.
Maryland and Virginia were bearing the brunt of the storm and seeing the highest snowfalls, he said.
“It’s pretty rough out there,” said the Maryland Emergency Management Agency’s Ed McDonough.
In terms of the Baltimore-Washington corridor, “this is probably the biggest storm we’ve ever had,” he said.
Emergency teams that struggled to repair the power cuts were hampered by the miserable weather.
“We have a lot of scattered outages and the road conditions are not really working with us,” said Pepco spokesman Andre Francis, pleading for patience as some customers were told the blackouts could last days.
About 200 National Guardsmen had been deployed across Maryland, while in Virginia police confirmed that a father and son were killed on Friday when they stopped to give assistance to a stranded car.
Police in the state had responded to 3,167 calls for help, more than two-thirds of which were because of car accidents or stranded vehicles.
Three state troopers were also injured in storm-related accidents in Virginia.
All flights out of the capital’s Reagan National airport were canceled, along with most flights out of Dulles International Airport in Virginia, while there was limited service at Baltimore.
A hangar roof collapsed at the Dulles Jet Center early on Saturday, said Rob Yengling, spokesman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority. Five people spending the night inside to shelter from the storm escaped without injuries.
States to the north like Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware are more used to heavy snowfalls and got their share of the great blizzard.
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was buried by 68cm, reportedly the city’s second-deepest all-time snowfall, and 69.9cm were reported at American University in Washington, DC.
The storm generated equal parts frustration and fascination.
In the normally bustling capital, sight-seers walked thigh-deep through the snow along the famous national mall or went cross-country skiing down eerily empty boulevards.
Alix Lawe, who works with the US Air Force, was out for a run in the snow, and told reporters: “It’s so fun. I’m from Florida, I’ve never seen so much snow.”
Snowplows were trying to keep emergency routes and main highways clear, but most officials said it would take days to reach the smaller streets, and warned of a difficult morning commute today.
The capital’s transportation system has shut down 40 above-ground subway stations and halted bus service, meaning transport links between Washington and its heavily populated suburbs were snapped, with most major roads impassable.
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