Blizzard roars into US north-east
New York, January 4
The first major winter storm of 2018 bore down on the US north-east on Thursday, closing schools and government offices and disrupting travel as work crews scrambled to clear roads of snow before plummeting temperatures turn it to treacherous ice.
After bringing rare snowfall to the southeast a day earlier, the storm carried rapid accumulation and high winds to New York, where subway systems appeared less crowded than usual as many commuters heeded officials’ warnings to stay home.
Blizzard warnings were in place along the coast from North Carolina to Maine, with the National Weather Service forecasting winds as high as 89 kmph that may bring down tree limbs and knock out power. More than 30 cm of snow was forecast for Boston and coastal areas in northern New England.
The storm is the product of a rapid and rare plunge in barometric pressure that some weather forecasters are referring to as bombogenesis, or the so-called “bomb cyclone.” The term comes from the merging of two words: bomb and cyclogenisis, according to private forecaster AccuWeather.
On Wednesday, the storm dumped snow on Florida’s capital Tallahassee for the first time in 30 years, and was expected to last through the day.
About 3,000 airline flights within, into or out of the US were canceled ahead of the storm’s arrival on Thursday, with New York’s three major airports and Boston’s Logan International seeing as many as three out of four flights called off, according to tracking service FlightAware.com.
Federal government offices planned to delay opening for two hours on Thursday, while state officials in Connecticut and Massachusetts ordered non-essential workers to stay home. — Reuters
