NEW YORK: A powerful winter storm dumped heavy snow and blasted the U.S. Northeast with high winds, closing schools, restricting travel and snarling transportation from major highways to busy airports. Officials in multiple cities and states declared emergencies and urged residents to stay off the roads as crews worked to clear streets and restore service. Meteorologists described the system as the strongest in a decade for parts of the region, with whiteout conditions reported as snowfall intensified Monday and cleanup continued into Tuesday.
Air travel was among the hardest hit. Airlines and flight-tracking services reported more than 8,000 U.S. flight cancellations and delays on Monday, with the heaviest disruptions concentrated around Boston and the New York City area. The Federal Aviation Administration cited Winter Storm Hernando as a driver of delays and cancellations at Boston Logan and at New York-area airports including Newark, Kennedy and LaGuardia, as well as Philadelphia. Carriers said they were working to rebuild schedules Tuesday as conditions allowed.
Rail and local transit also faced widespread disruption. Amtrak canceled dozens of trains, including service between New York and Boston and on other routes across the Northeast, as snow and wind affected the region’s main rail corridor. In New York City, transit officials said subway lines were mostly operating by Monday evening after earlier delays, though rail service remained suspended in Staten Island. Some commuter rail lines to suburbs north and east of the city were expected to resume limited service ahead of the Tuesday morning commute.
Travel bans and closures
Snow totals and wind gusts underscored the storm’s severity. Central Park recorded 19 inches of snow, while Warwick, Rhode Island, exceeded 3 feet, among the highest totals reported. Rhode Island’s T.F. Green International Airport paused operations Monday as it dealt with nearly 38 inches of snow, a record at the site that surpassed a mark set in 1978. The strongest reported wind gust reached 83 mph in Nantucket, and hurricane-force gusts were observed across parts of Cape Cod, compounding hazardous travel conditions.
States and municipalities imposed restrictions to keep roads clear for plows and emergency vehicles. Massachusetts instituted a travel ban in parts of the state, including Plymouth, Bristol and Barnstable counties. Connecticut enacted a temporary ban on commercial travel that state officials later lifted after about 23 hours, while Rhode Island maintained a broader travel ban for vehicles during the storm’s peak. Utilities across the region reported widespread outages, with hundreds of thousands of customers losing electricity in states including Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware and Rhode Island.
Schools and recovery efforts
The storm forced widespread school closures and shifts to remote learning as cities and suburbs grappled with snow-covered streets and sidewalks. New York City canceled classes Monday, and Mayor Zohran Mamdani said schools would reopen for in-person learning Tuesday. Some local officials and school representatives questioned whether reopening would be feasible in hard-hit areas where snow remained piled along walkways. Philadelphia’s public schools switched to online learning Monday and Tuesday, and several districts on Long Island and in New York suburbs said they would cancel classes again Tuesday.
As the storm moved away, airlines and airports began assessing the scale of the backlog. Flight data showed roughly one in five flights was canceled Monday for several major carriers, and industry analytics firm Cirium said about 19% of U.S. flights were canceled that day, far above a typical 1% cancellation rate. Cirium projected cancellations would ease to about 7% on Tuesday, though airline schedules remained fluid. JetBlue said it had canceled about 1,600 flights through Wednesday, and flight-tracking data showed more than 2,000 flights in and out of the United States were canceled Tuesday, largely involving airports in New York, New Jersey and Boston. – By Content Syndication Services.