February 10, 2010
By Oren Dorell and Alan Levin
USA Today
As people on the East Coast waited for the second snowshoe to drop, airlines canceled thousands of flights, and Meals on Wheels in Baltimore scrapped deliveries.
Photo: Security lanes are empty at Chicago's Midway International Airport Tuesday after Southwest stopped all flights due to snow. Thousands of flights are grounded in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast on Wednesday due to the same storm. (By M. Spencer Green, AP)
"It's a bad travel day," said Julie King, spokeswoman for Continental Airlines.
Blizzard warnings spanned the Mid-Atlantic early Wednesday as the second major snowstorm in less than a week barreled into the region, leaving more than 10 inches of new snow in the Washington area before dawn and threatening a similar whiteout for New York City.
Plows have been rolling around the clock for days in the nation's capital, Philadelphia and Baltimore after nearly 3 feet of snow fell in some areas — and they won't be stopping anytime soon.
A forecast of at least a foot of new snow wasn't welcome in Washington and Philadelphia, which were hit hard by a blizzard over the weekend. Each needs about 9 more inches to give the cities their snowiest winters since 1884, the first year records were kept.
"It's hard to find anything in the history books of these types of storms back-to-back," National Weather Service meteorologist Stephen Konarik told the Associated Press.
New York, which managed to avoid last week's blizzard, was not so lucky Wednesday. Flakes were coming down fast during the morning commute, and the National Weather Service issued blizzard warnings and predicted 10 to 16 inches of snowfall. The city school system's 1.1 million students enjoyed a snow day — only the third in six years.
The storms have kept some workers and students home for the better part of a week. About 230,000 federal workers in Washington have been off since Friday afternoon, when the first storm began. The U.S. House announced it was scrapping the rest of its workweek. Several hearings and meetings in Congress and federal agencies were postponed, including one planned to address Toyota's massive recalls.
But the effects of the federal government's closure were negligible since about 85% of federal employees work outside the Washington region. An IRS spokeswoman said tax returns should not be affected.
Continental canceled all 600 or so flights into and out of its Newark hub, all flights into Washington's Reagan National and Dulles airports, Baltimore and Philadelphia, and many flights into Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Columbus, Ohio, King said.
US Airways grounded 1,422 of its 3,100 daily flights today, spokeswoman Valerie Wunder said.
Meals on Wheels of Central Maryland, which serves 1,700 people two meals a day, made 300 deliveries Tuesday — three days' worth of food to clients "in desperate need," Executive Director Thomas Grazio said — and planned to make none today.
Some people had a hard time finding food on supermarket shelves that had been shopped clean of the basics.
Nina Thompkins, a financial analyst who lives and works in northeast Washington, said she crossed into Maryland to find a stocked grocery store.
At the Safeway and Giant supermarkets near her home, "even the frozen food sections were empty," Thompkins said. "Milk, butter, all the necessities were gone."
James Allen, 25, of Northampton, England, arrived Sunday on the first flight to land at Baltimore's airport after its runway reopened from the last storm. He was visiting friend Julia Tracey, 25, a nurse at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The two were at a downtown grocery store Tuesday searching in vain for fresh herbs for a recipe.
Allen had planned to stay in Baltimore for a few days, but "it's probably going to turn into a few weeks now."
In West Virginia, where 40 counties were under winter storm warnings, Gov. Joe Manchin urged people to make sure snow was cleared from roofs of public buildings to avoid a repeat of 1998, when roof collapses were blamed for at least three deaths.
On the West Coast, where the National Weather Service predicted up to 1.5 inches of rain could cause mudslides in areas affected by wildfires last year, Los Angeles County sheriff's deputies went door-to-door with evacuation orders for 541 hillside homes, the Associated Press reported.
Contributing: Doyle Rice, The Associated Press
http://www.usatoday.com/weather/storms/winter/2010-02-09-snowstorm_N.htm