Behemoth storm dumps snow on Northeast
Updated at 10:25 p.m. ET
PROVIDENCE, R.I. New Englanders began the back-breaking job of digging out from as much as 3 feet of snow Saturday and emergency crews used snowmobiles to reach shivering motorists stranded overnight on New York's Long Island after a howling storm swept through the Northeast.
Is another storm on its way to Northeast?
About 510,000 homes and businesses remained without power late Saturday night, down from a total of about 650,000, and some could be cold and dark for days. Roads across the New York-to-Boston corridor of roughly 25 million people were impassable. Cars were entombed by drifts. Some people found the wet, heavy snow packed so high against their homes they couldn't get their doors open.
"It's like lifting cement. They say it's 2 feet, but I think it's more like 3 feet," said Michael Levesque, who was shoveling snow in Quincy, Mass., for a landscaping company.
Quincy Police Officer Sheryl Potter evacuated Joanie Alvarado and her baby daughter, CBS News correspondent Terrell Brown reported Saturday. It was Potter's 10th rescue of the day. She said she hadn't seen anything like this in her lifetime.
Nancy Reed, president of the power company for the region, told CBS News it could be Monday or Tuesday before the power comes back."People need to brace themselves, and they need to find shelter if they're cold," she said.
In Providence, where the drifts were 5 feet high and telephone lines encrusted with ice and snow drooped under the weight, Jason Harrison labored for nearly three hours to clear his blocked driveway and front walk and still had more work to do. His snowblower, he said, "has already paid for itself."
At least five deaths in the U.S. were blamed on the overnight snowstorm, including an 11-year-old boy in Boston who was overcome by carbon monoxide as he sat in a running car to keep warm while his father shoveled Saturday morning.
Powerful blizzard descends on Northeast
Airlines scratched more than 5,300 flights through Saturday. On "CBS This Morning: Saturday," Ben Mutzabaugh, a travel writer for USA Today, estimated that close to 6,000 flights would be cancelled by the end of the day.
Blowing with hurricane-force winds of more than 80 mph in places, the storm hit hard along the heavily populated Interstate 95 corridor between New York City and Maine. Milford., Conn., got 38 inches of snow, and Portland, Maine, recorded 31.9, shattering a 1979 record. Several communities in New York and across New England got more than 2 feet.
Still, the storm was not as bad as some of the forecasts led many to fear, and not as dire as the Blizzard of '78, used by longtime New Englanders as the benchmark by which all other winter storms are measured.
By midday Saturday, the National Weather Service reported preliminary snowfall totals of 24.9 inches in Boston, or fifth on the city's all-time list. Bradley Airport near Hartford, Conn., got 22 inches, for the No. 2 spot in the record books there.
Concord, N.H., got 24 inches of snow, the second-highest amount on record and a few inches short of the reading from the great Blizzard of 1888.
In New York, where Central Park recorded 11 inches, not even enough to make the Top 10 list, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city "dodged a bullet" and its streets were "in great shape." The three major airports — LaGuardia, Kennedy and Newark, N.J. — were up and running by late morning after shutting down the evening before.
As CBS News correspondent Manuel Bojorquez reported, Marietta Dyer was among the passengers stranded at New York's JFK Airport waiting to visit her ailing father in Peru. "I'm just hoping that somebody will be able to make some sense and put us in a plane and send us to where we need to go," she said.
Most of the power outages were in Massachusetts, where more than 400,000 homes and businesses were left in the dark. In Rhode Island, a peak of around 180,000 customers lost power, or about one-third of the state.
By nightfall, utility crews had started to make significant progress in restoring power and bringing those numbers down.
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As the cold hardens the snow, it's like lifting 80lb. rocks. Then, once the driveway is cleared, the snow plows come by and block it with more rocks which have to be re-shoveled out of the way.
Then one day, after many years of thinking about it, I had had enough.
Moved away in December 2002.
All my memories are there but I won't be coming back to live there.
I still can't believe I spent a lifetime there. Nothing has changed, the politics, the storms, the infrastructure, the electrical power outages...
Nothing has changed....
When the sun bakes the snow, and the surface temp heats up, that's what tends to add weight to the snow load; the moisture content condenses, and becomes more dense.
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LOL - Not quite. Where the water ends up is all about equilibrium which is dependent on temperature and relative concentrations of water. Melted snow is no heavier then un-melted snow, but it does become more "dense" giving the impression of being heavier. Nice try. Stick to legal - if you a lawyer there are many things I can learn from you.
As it goes this was a minor storm for NJ. I still remember the one in the mid 90's where we got 48 inches and it was at least 48 inches and I didn't own a snow blower at the time!
Good for them! Enjoy the white stuff and the fun sledding and snow man making!
It kills me how the news people stand out in the storm for hours and hours. Like it's really necessary. And then there are the idiots who come out onto the streets after being told to stay off them.
One couple came out with their tiny baby, and another with their dog. The girl asked why they were out there and they both basically had the same answer. It was baby's first blizzard!! WRONG. They are out there for two reasons. One, people think if the media is out there, then they can be out there. But the biggest reason is ATTENTION. They want to be on CAMERA. If the camera wasn't there they probably wouldn't have been there either.
Both were irresponsible parents. It was 19 degrees out!
And the news people are irresponsible too. They need to stop turning the cameras on these people.