BOSTON — Its winds howling at more than 70 mph, the Blizzard of 2015 slammed Boston and surrounding parts of New England on Tuesday, piling up more than 2 feet of snow while showing none of the mercy it unexpectedly showed New York City.
The storm punched out a 40- to 50-foot section of a seawall in Marshfield, Mass., badly damaging a vacant home. In Newport, R.I., it toppled a 110-foot replica of a Revolutionary War sailing vessel in dry dock, breaking its mast and puncturing its hull.
The blizzard’s force and relentlessness stunned even winter-hardened New Englanders. Flooding was reported along some coastal communities.
“It’s a wicked storm,” Jeff Russell said as he fought a mounting snowdrift threatening to cover a window at his home in Scarborough, Maine.
The snow in New England began Monday evening and continued most of Tuesday. A blizzard warning for Boston ended Tuesday evening as the snow tapered off, but one remained in effect for the south coast, Cape Cod and nearby islands.
The area also was dealing with bitter cold: The low in Boston on Wednesday is expected to be 10 degrees, with a wind chill of minus 5, and forecasters said it will not get above freezing for the next week or so.
The Philadelphia-to-Boston corridor of more than 35 million people had braced for a paralyzing blast Monday evening and into Tuesday after forecasters warned of a storm of potentially historic proportions.
The weather lived up to its billing in New England and on New York’s Long Island, which also got clobbered.
But in the New York City area, the snowfall wasn’t all that bad, falling short of a foot. By Tuesday morning, buses and subways were starting to run again, and driving bans there and in New Jersey had been lifted.
The glancing blow left politicians defending their near-total shutdown on travel. Some commuters grumbled, but others sounded a better-safe-than-sorry note and even expressed sympathy for the weather forecasters.
National Weather Service director Louis Uccellini said his agency should have done a better job of communicating the uncertainty in its forecast. But he also said the storm may, in fact, prove to be one of the biggest ever in parts of Massachusetts.
Around New England, snowplows struggled to keep up, and Boston police drove several dozen doctors and nurses to work at hospitals.
Nearly 21 inches of snow coated Boston’s Logan Airport by evening. Lunenburg reported 33 inches.
Waterford, Conn., had 23 inches. Montauk, on the eastern end of Long Island, got about 2 feet.
“It feels like a hurricane with snow,” said Maureen Keller, who works at a oceanfront resort in Montauk.
At least 30,000 homes and businesses were without power in the Boston-Cape Cod area, including the island of Nantucket, where a hurricane-force wind gust of 78 mph was reported. Also, a 72 mph gust was measured on Martha’s Vineyard.
“It felt like sand hitting you in the face,” Bob Paglia said after walking his dog in Whitman, a town about 20 miles south of Boston.
Two deaths, both on Long Island, were tied to the storm: a 17-year-old who crashed into a light pole while tubing down a snow-covered street and an 83-year-old man with dementia who was found dead in his backyard.
As the storm pushed into the Northeast on Monday, the region came to a near standstill, alarmed by forecasters’ dire predictions. More than 7,700 flights were canceled, and schools, businesses, government offices and transit systems shut down.
Evan Gold, senior vice president for Planalytics, a firm that advises companies on weather issues, estimated the economic losses for the total Northeast at $500 million.
National Weather Service forecaster Gary Szatkowski, of Mount Holly, N.J., tweeted an apology: “You made a lot of tough decisions expecting us to get it right, and we didn’t. Once again, I’m sorry.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie defended his statewide ban on travel as “absolutely the right decision to make,” given the dire forecast. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city will look at whether storm procedures could be improved but added: “You can’t be a Monday morning quarterback on something like the weather.”
