The day after a blizzard covered New York City with more than 30 inches of snow in some parts, grappling with its sheer volume was the next order of business.
At 7 a.m. on Sunday a travel ban imposed by New York State and city officials on Saturday afternoon was lifted. Tunnels and bridges into the city, all of which had been closed during the storm, reopened as well, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Service had been suspended during the storm on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North Railroad, as well as the aboveground routes of the subway and the Staten Island Railway. Also at 7 a.m., some Metropolitan Transportation Authority buses began rolling again.
Snow stopped falling around 10 p.m. on Saturday, leaving a total of 26.8 inches in Central Park, according to the National Weather Service, the second-highest amount recorded since 1869.
At Kennedy International Airport in Queens, 30.5 inches was reported. Crews worked overnight to clear runways though with thousands of flights canceled regionally, service had not yet been restored. New York Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Saturday “the vast majority” of flights would be canceled on Sunday.
The city’s snowfall was still less than that of parts of Maryland and West Virginia, where in some parts 40 inches had fallen. The storm which caused more than 10 states on the Eastern Seaboard to declare states of emergency, killed 18 on Saturday, according to The Associated Press. Several of the people, including a 94-year-old man in Smithtown on Long Island, appeared to have died while clearing snow, according to news reports.
On Manhattan streets after the snow stopped falling, couples strolled down the middle of Avenue of the Americas in the West Village on Saturday night. Times Square seemed sleepy; all Broadway shows had been canceled on Saturday, according to the Broadway League. In Herald Square, people made snow angels in the middle of 34th Street and uploaded them to social media. Yet even with the snowfall over, it seemed few were budging from being indoors – a stream of deliverymen skidded their bikes through the night in wheel-high snow.
The great dig-out began early on Sunday morning under a bright, almost-full moon the usual rumble of traffic was replaced with a silence punctuated in places with the scraping sounds of a few people with snow shovels.
In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, an hour before sunrise, Remer Lemus, 35, shoveled out the first of seven apartment building walkways he had to clear. He said he would spend half his day excavating as much snow as he could, and then the second half returning to do “detail” snow work, like around the edges of stairwells and sidewalks. “We haven’t seen snow this season and we got this storm,” he said. “It’s a lot of snow.”
Interactive Map | How Much Snow Has Fallen Reported accumulations of snow across the region, updated every hour.
Passers-by walked in the street, cleared in points by snowplows down to bare blacktop, rather than try the thickly covered sidewalk. Despite the ban on non-emergency or sanitation traffic until 7 a.m. Sunday, Albert Cepeda, 37, drove a gray delivery van at 5:30 a.m. along Bedford Avenue that was filled with fresh bread from the bakery for which he works. “We have to work,” he said. “If our bakery doesn’t work we have a problem.” He added that the main streets were easy enough to drive down, but on secondary streets the drifts made for white-knuckled driving. “It’s impossible,” he said.
The storm — blustery in some places, blinding in others — was a swirling, sprawling mass with a reach of nearly 1,000 miles. It flooded low-lying beaches and brought down trees and power lines, leaving thousands without electricity. The storm also glazed roads and varnished trees as it pummeled the Mid-Atlantic region with destructive force.
The ocean poured into shore towns in southern New Jersey: In Sea Isle City, floodwaters laden with chunks of ice surged down the streets, and in Wildwood the frigid, brackish water submerged cars hal
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