Snow Piles Up in Mid-Atlantic States

(CBS/AP)  Last Updated 12:41 p.m. ET

A blizzard battered the U.S. capital and Mid-Atlantic states Saturday, with emergency crews struggling to keep pace with the heavy, wet snow that piled up on roadways, toppled trees and left thousands without electricity.

Authorities blamed the storm for hundreds of accidents, including a deadly tractor-trailer wreck that killed a father and son who had stopped to help someone in Virginia. Some area hospitals asked people with four-wheel-drive vehicles to volunteer to pick up doctors and nurses to take them to work.

Most people seemed to be hunkered down at home early Saturday, out of the way of road crews. In downtown Washington, a few people ventured out to walk their dogs and clear away thigh-high snow from sidewalks. Plows and a few intrepid drivers cruised the snow-covered roads - a departure from the usual weekend traffic congestion.

A state of emergency was declared from Virginia to New Jersey, reports CBS News correspondent Whit Johnson. Blizzard warnings were issued for the District of Columbia, Baltimore, parts of New Jersey and Delaware and some areas west of the Chesapeake Bay.

Teams of workers armed with snow blowers and shovels tried to clear a path in front of office buildings and businesses. Washington officials hoped to keep roads clear and have the city back to its bustling pace by Monday.

"If the storm tracks as they're saying, we should be good and open for business Monday morning. That's our goal," said Karyn LeBlanc, a spokeswoman for the D.C. Department of Transportation.

Forecasters said the storm could be the biggest for the U.S. capital in modern history.

A record 2½ feet or more was predicted for Washington. As of early Saturday, 10 inches of snow was reported at the White House, while parts of Maryland and West Virginia were buried under more than 20 inches. Forecasters expected snowfall rates to increase, up to 2 inches per hour through Saturday morning.

CBS Station WUSA reported snowfall as of this morning totaling 39 inches in the appropriately named Frostburg, Md., and 43 inches in nearby Flintstone, close to the Pennsylvania border.

Transportation Snarls

Metro, the transit system the Washington area is heavily dependent upon, closed all but the underground rail service and suspended bus service. Maryland's public transportation also shut down Saturday, including Baltimore's Metro.

Some planes managed to take off from D.C.-area airports but many flights were canceled, forcing passengers to try their luck with the train.

"My flight was for this afternoon," one traveler told CBS News, "and then I changed it yesterday on the assumption it would be canceled, and it was this morning."

"Things are fairly manageable, but trees are starting to come down," said D.C. fire department spokesman Pete Piringer, whose agency responded to some of the falling trees. No injuries were reported.

At Dulles International Airport, part of a hangar roof collapsed and damaged some of the private jets housed inside, though no one was hurt, said Courtney Mickalonis, spokeswoman for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority.

More than 250 flights for Friday and Saturday were canceled at Philadelphia International Airport. Six to twelve inches is expected in the Philadelphia area, with eight to fourteen inches predicted to fall in Pittsburgh.

The storm has shut down Atlantic City Airport, but the situation was quite different at Newark Liberty International Airport in northern New Jersey, which saw much less snow from the nor'easter.

While some flights were canceled or delayed, most arriving and departing flights there were on schedule Saturday. Normal operations also were reported at New York's LaGuardia and JFK airports.

Amtrak also canceled some of its Northeast Corridor trains Saturday, though the company says some trains are still running on the key route.

Traffic was light on most major roadways Saturday, as residents heeded warnings to stay home during the storm.

"So far our call volume is below average, so it seems motorists have taken our advice to stay off the roadways," Tracy Noble, a spokeswoman for AAA Mid-Atlantic, said late Saturday morning.

About 75 percent of those calls involved vehicles stuck in snow or drivers needing a tow truck, she said.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation said portions of major roadways were closed after several accidents.

New Jersey Transit is suspending most of its southern New Jersey routes as snow keeps piling up in the region.

The transit agency says its buses in the area will be off the road by 10:30 a.m. Saturday. And it wasn't clear when the buses would resume their routes.

Across the region, transportation officials deployed thousands of trucks and crews and had hundreds of thousands of tons of salt at the ready.

The blizzard did not keep President Barack Obama from traveling a few blocks through deserted streets in a motorcade of sport utility vehicles from the White House to a nearby hotel to speak at the Democratic National Committee's winter meeting.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Obama thanked the activists for being willing to brave the blizzard which he referred to as "Snowmageddon."

Power Out

Hundreds of thousands of customers across the region had lost electricity and more outages were expected to be reported because of all the downed power lines. A hospital fire in D.C. sent about three dozen patients scurrying from their rooms to safety in a basement. The blaze started when a snow plow truck caught fire near the building.

The snow comes less than two months after a Dec. 19 storm dumped more than 16 inches on Washington. Snowfalls of this magnitude - let alone two in one season - are rare in the area. According to the National Weather Service, Washington has gotten more than a foot of snow only 13 times since 1870.

The heaviest on record was 28 inches in January 1922. The biggest snowfall for the Washington-Baltimore area is believed to have been in 1772, before official records were kept, when as much as 3 feet fell, which George Washington and Thomas Jefferson penned in their diaries.

[barbaram99]

I am Maine born..It uae to snow and stay ther all winter. I member winters. Everyone uses oil. Everyone in all states. I use a used Notebook to blog..I think the snow is pretty. Us older folks member snow. We got reagy for it every year. It stayed put. The nation did not shut down just cos there be snow on the ground..Everything moved along as people learnt to live in that kind of weather. Now people have a problem with it. Mind ye we had to have warm clothes..lots of blankets..We closed off parts of the house not needed in the cold to save on fuel. Those that drove put snow tires on and carried things in the car needed. They did not drive a white car as that was dumb. Yeather is forever changing as is the earth. Humans have helpped it.

[whitchens]

Yo, lloyd! Some stupid idiot beefed my comment, probably you. Come back and debate me re global warming when you have a Ph.D. in physics and not a BA in social studies, or whatever you studied. BTW, exactly what are your scientific credentials?

[askagain]

As far back as I can remember, snow, floods, and earth quakes were simply natural occurrences. When did they become the result of global cooling, global warming, or climate change? One thing that seems constant is that the climate is always changing, with or without human intervention. Certainly, man did not influence the ice or glacial age.

[lloydbest1]

Whitchens:

I am mystified by what appears to be a personal attack. Apparently I struck a nerve....."Beefed my comment"? By that do you mean to say I reported whatever it was you said and had it removed? I sure hope not because I have NEVER reported ANYthing posed on these boards - other than spam - to CBS's PC police no matter how much I was in disagreement or how much it personally offended me. NEVER. GOT THAT, DAMMITT??????

GOOD!

Now. As regards to what I believe set you off.... Correct me if I am wrong but I believe it stems from a question I posed to another contributer, "CommieBlaster" just a few hours ago - The YouTube video.

It still hasn't been answered. I still don't see what Obama's cap and trade policy (which was started by Bush, by the way) has to do with a snow storm that could lock down the east coast for several days. I haven't reported his(her) comment either and, for all I know, It may be good information. I tried accessing it to see if it really was relavent to this topic and couldn't. Not surprised, a lot of these links are broken.

"Come back and debate me re global warming". How can I do that when I don't even now what your stance is? I can and have argued both sides of the issue but there two subjects I will never (if I can help it) offer an opinion on on these boards and one of them is the "Global Warming" controversy.
I don't even have a BA in social studies let alone a PHD in Physics. I'm a millwright for cri-sakes!
But....
I can read and can extract good info from peer reviewed articles with the best of them. And your PHD in whateverthehell you got it in does not validate your unwarranted bat-sh*t response to my original question

[CBSisCommunist5]

Global Warming...Global Warming...Global Warming...

[whitchens]

Yow! Global warming idiots run wild. Bad science runs wild. Go with the flow dudes. This is nothing compared to the next magnitude 8 earthquake in the Bay Area of CA. It'll break the US economy.

As we said during the '78 oil crisis "May those bastards in the East freeze in the dark."

[redbarron73]

'78 oil crisis?

[whitchens]

Jesus Christ, red. You must be quite young or live in the East if you can't remember that epithet. May the Eastern bastards freeze in the dark. We in CA heat our houses with US natural gas. You Eastern bastards use foreign oil for heat. Shame, shame, shame.

[barbaram99]

Years ago it snow as early as Sep and stay on the ground to June. It got cold. Storm windows and tar paper went around the house..Goods went thru. The roads were kept clear. We had windor clothes. The only thing was it was harder for me as a legally blind. The snow was there..At school we made forts, played king of the hill as the snow was high. We knew it would last and so we learnt to live in winter. Wehave 4 seasons. Growing up we always had a white Chiristmas. I think the snow is pretty.. To me winter is snow . Seattle does not have snow..I have family in the east. I never thought growing up the snow would be gone in Maine as I member the cold winters there. My step father drove the state trucks and he plowed the the roads. He is retired. People drove in it.

[lloydbest1]

I grew up in southern New York, not too far from where the action is now.

I am mindful of an insanely powerful snow storm that raged through my part of the world nearly 50 years ago. It didn't have the durability this one did nor did it have the broad reach of the "Superstorm" of 1993 or the famous "Blizzard of '96". But what it did do was break every snowfall record ever set in a stretch of territory ranging from Scranton and Wilkes-Barre in Pensylvania; through Sullivan, Orange, Dutchess, Ulster and Putnam counties in New York to finally blow itself out to sea and thence annoy Nova Scotia and the rest of the Maritimes.

As I recall, it lasted no longer than about 18 hours but while it raged, it dumped more snow in the Mid Hudson valley in that small amount of time than the legendary "Blizzard of '88" did in four days. we saw accumulations from this thing match the worst Lake Effect events and then some. I measured 29 inches on my front sidewalk and that was five hours before it quit. Some parts on northwestern Connecticut and northeastern Pennsylvania got more than 5 feet.
And afterwards......We saw temperatures drop to levels not seen since the Little Ice Age. Mercury froze in thermometers and in some parts of the Catskills, it got so cold motor oil wouldn't pour and diesel fuel acquired the consistancy of molasses.

I am not trivializing this storm, merely pointing out it is not unique and had the one I remember impacted an area as large as this one is impacting now, people would still be talking about it a hundred years hence.

[zootsuithap]

Weather = massive snow fall, and record cold. all over the globe.

Global climate change = a crooked line on a graph made by a crooked scientist to get grant monies from a crooked congress.

[ken1dall]

Gosh, this global warming is getting to be a real nuisance!

[engineer1503]

CBS News and other media have helped portray nonsense by using the catchphrase "Global Warming". The entire theory predits that weather will get more violent and more weird. It predicts that in general storms will get stronger, hot days will get hotter, and cold days will get colder. Places that now have lots of water (The midwest and southeast US) probably won't have so much.

[curse914]

by TryTakingMyMoney February 6, 2010 11:18 AM EST
This global warming is coming down hard on DC...funny! Obama and Al Gore are probably huddled up in the White House together...saying save yourself!

=========================

Check the weather for the North West. It has been record in the other direction. And good luck with the Winter Olympics minus the snow.

I find it fascinating that religious conservatives have made this "their issue", given their propensity for myth. If the Pope said Global Warming is real, they would fall to their knees and pray.

The Pope reaction to the fantasy movie Avatar is a good indicator of why conservatives (leaders) have a problem with Global Warming. They fear that a love of nature could lead to nature worship and they would have to compete for the gullible dullards. And those in the Ayn Rand Unfettered Capitalism wing of the GOP fear restriction (regulations) on industry; not necessarily in the United States.

"The Vatican newspaper and radio station are criticizing James Cameron's 3-D blockbuster for flirting with the idea that worship of nature can replace religion ? a notion the pope has warned against. "