NEW YORK — A day after a fierce blizzard clobbered much of the Northeast, a brilliant sun blazed down from cerulean skies and hundreds of cities and towns shoveled and sledded their way back to life.
Airlines resumed limited service at major airports, but more than 760 additional flights were scrubbed, most all in the New York area, which bore the brunt of the mammoth nor’easter that roared up the East Coast on Sunday and Monday.
The extent of the chaos, and the challenge of the cleanup, only became evident Tuesday amid the endless snowy landscapes, ankle-deep puddles of city slush and harrowing stories of whiteout conditions and treacherous roads.
As New Yorkers dug out from what tabloid headlines dubbed a “Snowpocalypse,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said tow trucks had removed about 1,000 vehicles abandoned or stuck on just three of the city’s outer expressways.
“This storm is not like any other we’ve had to deal with,” he said at a news conference.
The “No. 1 challenge,” Bloomberg added, was finding and digging out emergency vehicles that got stuck on impassable roads or wedged in the snow while responding to a flood of 911 calls.
“Until we can pull out the ambulances, pull out the firetrucks, pull out the buses, pull out the private cars, the plows just can’t do anything,” he said. “We still have a long way to go.
“Obviously stuck ambulances with patients on board are handled first,” the mayor said.
Crews freed 168 snow-trapped ambulances overnight, he added, but “some of them, unfortunately, got re stuck.” Citing efforts to borrow and hire extra tow trucks and equipment from around the region, Bloomberg called the operation “the biggest effort to clear snow that our city has ever seen.”
Air traffic was still curtailed at the region’s airports, normally among the nation’s busiest, and stranded passengers still stretched out in sleeping bags and blankets on the floor. Small children curled up for naps in large plastic luggage tubs.
Thousands of passengers, who hoped to rebook flights, stood or sat in luggage-strewn lines that snaked down the terminals. In some cases, the crowds were so tangled that it wasn’t clear which line went to which counter.
At least 700 flights were canceled by midafternoon Tuesday at New York’s John F. Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark Liberty international airports, said Sara Beth Joren, spokeswoman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
“There are limited aeronautical operations,” Joren said. “That means lots of cancellations.” She could not say when normal operations would resume.
The city’s two largest airports, Newark and JFK, could use only one runway each for arrivals and departures, although work crews aimed to clear additional runways by nightfall, said Laura Brown, spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Some flights arriving at Newark were delayed by more than eight hours, and flights coming into JFK were late by more than five hours, according to the FAA website.
Some people took the snow in stride.
Karen Fischer and Tyler Cleveland had brought their combined family of five kids from Calgary, Alberta, to spend New Year’s Eve watching the ball drop in Times Square. It was a Christmas gift to the kids, ages 11 to 15, and they weren’t deterred by a little snow.
“We landed and we were like, ‘Where’s the snow?’ I mean, really, we’re from Canada,” said Fischer.
Others turned adversity into adventure.
Linda Menard and her three daughters — ages 18, 16 and 13 — had taken a train from Boston to see a Broadway show. They arrived in the blizzard Monday, saw “Elf,” slogged past mountains of snow to see the giant Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, and were back in Penn Station late Tuesday waiting for their train home.
“Our taxi got stuck twice in the snow and finally we jumped ship and walked,” said Allie Menard, the eldest sister. “That’s life.”
Easy for her to say: She wore waterproof boots. Her two younger sisters had wet feet.
