New York:
A powerful blizzard struck Boston and surrounding New England on Tuesday, leaving some 4.5 million people grappling with as much as three feet of snow and coastal flooding but sparing New York City residents who had braced for a significant blast.
Snow was forecast to keep falling into early Wednesday in eastern New England, possibly setting a record snowfall in Boston.
“There are drifts now of four, five and six feet in some places,” Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker said. “This is clearly a very big storm for most of Massachusetts.”
A statewide travel ban was scheduled to be lifted at midnight but Massachusetts residents were urged to stay off the roads if possible.
Boston-area trains, buses and subways were set to resume normal service on Wednesday but delays were predicted for the morning commute.
On the resort island of Nantucket, more than half of homes and businesses were still without power at early evening, and crews working to restore electricity were at times getting stuck on roads throughout the day, Police Chief William Pittman said.
It was an unprecedented step for what became, in New York City, a common storm: For the first time in its 110-year history, the subway system was shut down because of snow.
Transit workers, caught off guard by the shutdown that Governor Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Monday, scrambled to grind the network to a halt within hours.
Residents moved quickly to find places to stay, if they were expected at work the next day, or hustle home before service was curtailed and roads were closed.
And Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose residents rely upon the transit system by the millions, heard the news at roughly the time the public did. “We found out,” de Blasio said on Tuesday, “just as it was being announced.”
The storm largely spared the city, instead battering eastern Long Island and much of New England, where Nantucket lost power and Scituate, Massachusetts, flooded.
And on Tuesday, local and state officials were left to defend one of the most consequential decisions elected leaders can make: effectively closing a city, in light of an uncertain forecast.
With travel bans instituted across the region, residents had little choice but to heed the warnings to stay put.
The weather laid bare the civic and political high-wire act of the modern snowstorm — pocked with manic expectation-setting, escalating doomsayer proclamations and sporadic lapses in communication.
At the episode’s heart is the sort of damned-if-you-do decision that has bedevilled politicians for decades: Play it safe with closings, all but guaranteeing sweeping economic losses, or try to ride out the storm?
“I would much rather be in a situation where we say we got lucky than one where we didn’t get lucky and somebody died,” Cuomo said.
Briefings and interviews with officials suggest that recent challenges — including Hurricane Sandy, a snowstorm in Buffalo, New York, and public spats between top local leaders and forecasters — have left decision-makers even more risk-averse.
On Sunday, de Blasio said, “This could be the biggest snowstorm in the history of New York City,” a bit of speechmaking that spawned a widely distributed parody in The Onion: “NYC Mayor: ‘Reconcile Yourselves With Your God, for All Will Perish in the Tempest.’” (On Tuesday, the mayor gave a reading of the article for reporters at City Hall.)
The abundance of caution was perhaps understandable, particularly in this city. Last year, shortly after taking office, de Blasio drew the ire of snowbound residents on an under-ploughed Upper East Side. Weeks later, amid criticism that he left schools open in a heavy storm, the mayor, a Democrat, appeared to deflect blame to a shifting forecast, setting off a dispute with television weatherman Al Roker.
For this storm, the sanitation commissioner, Kathryn Garcia, first heard about the dire forecasts on Saturday afternoon. She thought the projection by the National Weather Service — possibly 3 or 4 inches of snow per hour by Monday night — was a misprint. “Can you get on National Weather,” Garcia recalled telling aides, “and find out what the hell they’re saying?”
In their storm preparations, according to an official, de Blasio and his staff alluded often to two predecessors: Michael R. Bloomberg, who was blamed in 2010 for snowed-in streets outside Manhattan, and John V. Lindsay, who faced withering criticism after a storm that killed 42 people in the city in 1969.
The message seemed clear: A failed snowstorm response sticks with a mayor. And de Blasio would not be seen as underprepared. “This is not going to be like other snowstorms,” the mayor said.
The heaviest snowfall was recorded outside Boston, with 36 inches (91.4cm) in Lunenburg, Massachusetts, and 35 inches (88.9cm) reported in Auburn, according to the National Weather Service.
Some 45,900 customers across the storm-hit region were without power, according to local utilities, with the bulk of the outages on Massachusetts’ Cape Cod and outlying islands.
The severe weather claimed the lives of at least two people.