NEW YORK — A ferocious storm packing freezing rain, heavy snow and furious wind gusts paralyzed most of the East Coast on Monday, sending dozens of cars into ditches, grounding hundreds of flights and closing school for millions of kids.
The storm’s devastating effects were seen up and down the coast. A crash caused a 15-mile traffic jam in North Carolina, forcing police and the Red Cross to go car to car to check on stranded drivers. The storm was blamed for 350 crashes in New Jersey, and a Maryland official counted about 50 cars in the ditch on one stretch of highway.
By Monday, the storm had moved north into New England, and most areas in the storm’s wake expected to see at least 8 to 12 inches of snow. The weather contributed to four deaths on roads in Massachusetts and Rhode Island and on Long Island.
The South was hit especially hard, dealing with record snowfalls, thick ice and power outages in a region not accustomed to such vicious weather.
In North Carolina, Raleigh got more than 3 inches of snow; the March snowfall for the city has exceeded 3 inches only 11 times in the last 122 years. Parts of Tennessee received the biggest snowfall since 1968.
Travelers were stranded everywhere, with about 950 flights canceled at the three main airports in the New York area and nearly 300 flights canceled in Philadelphia. Boston’s Logan International Airport had to shut down for about 40 minutes to clear a runway, and hundreds of flights were canceled there.
It was the first time in more than five years that New York City called off classes for its 1.1 million public school students.
The city dispatched 2,000 workers and 1,400 plows to work around the clock to clean New York’s 6,000 miles of streets. “It’s like plowing from here to Los Angeles and back,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference.
The snow began to accumulate in New Hampshire and Massachusetts as the storm moved north, but most residents there were taking it in stride.
“This is New England, after all,” said Dave Richardson of Salem, Mass.
Other extreme.
