A Storm Part Crippling and Part Enchanting

A Storm Part Crippling and Part Enchanting
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: February 6, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/us/07storm.html?th&emc=th


A blizzard that had forecasters reaching for superlatives engulfed the nation’s capital and the mid-Atlantic states on Saturday with record snowfalls that paralyzed transportation, commerce and all but emergency services. But it transformed the weekend into an enchanted snowbound adventure for millions.

Halfway across the chasm of winter, the storm charged over the Appalachians, smothering cities and quilting the countrysides of a half-dozen states from Virginia to New Jersey. It obliterated Washington with over 20 inches, Baltimore with a record 30 inches and Philadelphia with 26.7 inches. Some sections of West Virginia were hit by nearly three feet of snow.

But the blow, which began Friday night and tapered off at midafternoon on Saturday, had sharply defined shoulders to the north and south. It generally spared New York City (no snow fell in Central Park) and Long Island with a mere 3 to 6 inches, and the Southeastern states got off with some rain.

The hard edges of Washington were softened as the snow recast the capital of monuments and malls into a postcard town of soft ice cream shapes that had been statues and aerodynamic blobs that had been parked cars: the buried machines of a lost civilization. The Capitol and the White House vanished in the whiteout, cross-country skiers appeared in parks and the Potomac was a grayish plate of pewter.

The National Weather Service said the blizzard did not challenge Washington’s 28-inch record, set in January 1922, a snowfall that collapsed the roof of the Knickerbocker Theater, killing 98 people and injuring 158. Nor did it rival the three-foot snowfall of 1772, long before record-keeping began, although it was noted in the diaries of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

President Obama, unlike the millions snowed in just in time for the Super Bowl, rode down the plowed driveway of the White House in a four-wheel drive sport-utility vehicle to the Capital Hilton Hotel, where he spoke to the Democratic National Committee. The president, a veteran of Chicago snows who has chided Washington for its timidity in modest storms, could not resist a quip: “Snowmageddon,” he said to loud applause.

In a region ill-equipped to deal with so much snow, meteorologists had dubbed it “Snowpocalypse,” and there was no doubt it was big and dangerous: a vast brindled nebula on the satellite pictures that stretched 400 miles along the Chesapeake coast and a bounding monster on the ground that knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes, caused countless accidents and left at least two people dead.

Airports closed and flights across the region were canceled, many on Friday night in anticipation of the storm, and by Saturday the backlog had spilled back across the continent, raising concern about possible travel delays over several days. Amtrak and many local railroads canceled trains and interstate buses and transit systems in Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia were virtually shut down.

As snow fell in enormous sweeping curtains, piling up at a rate of several inches an hour, millions of people heeded warnings to stay home, and the ganglia of highways and back roads in Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and much of Pennsylvania were at times strangely motionless and silent.

The governors of Virginia, Maryland, Delaware and Pennsylvania declared states of emergency, and the National Guard was deployed to assist the police and people trapped on roads. In Virginia, the state police said a father and son, who had stopped on Interstate 81 to help a motorist, were killed Friday when a tractor-trailer struck them.

The combination of wet heavy snow and winds that gusted as high as 50 miles an hour toppled trees and power lines in Washington and the mid-Atlantic states. Blackouts affected more than 150,000 homes and businesses in Virginia, 150,000 customers in Maryland, 160,000 in Pennsylvania and 90,000 in New Jersey. Utility crews were working around the clock, but power companies were not certain when service might be restored.

“We are battling Mother Nature here,” Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland said at a morning news conference in Baltimore. “Our main message is that no one with an ounce of common sense goes out on the roads today. We are going to be digging out of this for some days to come.”

Maryland’s major airport, Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport, was closed. No public transportation was operating in the state, and many of the major highways had only one lane plowed. Some 300 members of the Maryland National Guard were mobilized to cope with the storm.

Matthew Kramar, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Sterling, Va., ticked off some of the big regional snow totals, mostly in the higher elevations — 33 inches in Bayard, W. Va., and in Smith Crossroads in Morgan County, W. Va., 32 inches at Howellsville, Va., 29.5 at Frostburg, Md., 28.5 inches at Savage, Md., and 30.3 inches at Elkridge, Md., southwest of Baltimore.

At Union Station in Washington, Matthew Boucher, of Gorham, Me., was stranded. He was on his way to a construction job in South Carolina when the storm hit, and had waited nearly a day as train after train going south was canceled. “I don’t have the money to go to a hotel, so I’m stuck here,” he said.

Three New Jersey Counties — Atlantic, Camden and Ocean — banned all but emergency vehicles from the roadways as the snow piled up. Atlantic City’s casinos were open, but the boardwalk was adrift in snow, and much of the city was shut down. Thousands of businesses across the region were closed for the weekend. Shoppers had mobbed grocery stores on Friday, picking shelves almost clean and stock up with supplies for the storm and munchies for the Super Bowl on Sunday in Miami. Some people were already calling it the Super Bowl storm of 2010.

Hundreds of churches across the region announced the cancellation of Sunday services. United States Postal Service operations were closed in Washington, Maryland and Northern Virginia.

It was the second big storm of the season for Washington, coming less than two months after a Dec. 19 snowfall of 16 inches. Snows of that magnitude — not to mention two in one season — are rare in the nation’s capital.

After the snow stopped falling Saturday afternoon, the skies turned blue in the remaining hours of daylight as the crowd in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of downtown Washington grew even larger with hundreds of people on hand. A giant snowball fight — with police cars and sport utility vehicles a common target — intensified.

But when a city police cruiser became lodged in the snow, the taunts and snowballs suddenly ended. “Push them out!” a man shouted and nearly a dozen people ran over to help get the police car on its way.

Young staffers from the administration and several from Capitol Hill were among the revelers who filled the streets when the snow ended and the calm before the cleanup began.

On the National Mall in Washington, cross-country skiers and children on sleds moved through the storm like ghosts, padded and muffled to the eyes. Sounds were distant and subdued. The trees were magical: dark limbed, looped and netted, with flourishes of white lace. And in the distance, the Capitol standing like a sentinel in the storm.



Reporting was contributed by Liz Robbins in New York; Scott Shane and Rebecca Corbett in Baltimore; Jeff Zeleny, Janie Lorber and Ron Nixon in Washington; Robert Strauss in Trenton, N.J.; and Lisa Bacon in Richmond, Va.