Karnorjax, are you snowed in?
Posted: Sun Feb 12, 2006 8:11 pm
Hope you're enjoying the snow...
Snow day! New York struggles under nearly 58 cm
Last Updated Sun, 12 Feb 2006 13:38:34 EST
CBC News
The snow was not quite 23 inches (58 centimetres) deep in New York's Central Park on Sunday morning as a near-record blizzard paralyzed the region and the mayor begged people to stay off the roads.
"This is a very dangerous, big storm," Michael Bloomberg said in a televised update.
"Don't drive unless you have to. It is very dangerous on the roads," he said.
The same system was moving into Nova Scotia, interrupting an unusually mild stretch of weather in Atlantic Canada, but Maritimers seemed to take it more in their stride.
For New Yorkers, the 22.8-inch snowfall was almost unprecedented. The record was 26.4 inches in two days after Christmas 1947, the Long Island newspaper Newsday reported. "This is one to remember," a federal meteorologist told the paper.
Thunder and lightning, too
Adding to the drama, the blizzard was accompanied by an unusual winter electrical storm.
"High winds drove stinging cold snowflakes into the streets at a rate of three inches an hour," the New York Times said, "while the sky cracked with thunder and lightning."
As thousands of city workers put in 12-hour shifts salting and plowing streets, the city's website offered temporary shovelling jobs at $10 US an hour to able-bodied applicants eligible to work in the United States.
Whiteouts shut airports from Washington to Boston and snow covered the landscape from Virginia to Maine, with flakes reported as far south as Tennessee, Reuters reported.
Massachusetts braces for storm surges
Tens of thousands of people were without electricity in the Washington and Baltimore areas, and the risk of coastal flooding was a major concern in Massachusetts.
Meteorologists predicted 2.5-foot storm surges from Cape Ann to Cape Cod with seas off the coast running up to 25 feet, the Associated Press said.
