Winter-Weary East Struggles to Dig Out : Weather: Airports reopen in Northeast. But elsewhere, hundreds of thousands of households are still without power.

Exhausted travelers, snowplow drivers and winter-weary residents tried to cope Saturday with the worst snowstorm to hit the East in more than a decade.

Airports reopened as snow was plowed off runways in the Northeast, and utility crews spliced ice-damaged power lines in the South. Still, life was far from normal after the latest in a numbing succession of storms.

In New York City, the Hudson River resembled an ice floe. Plows buried parked cars under mountains of snow and people skied in parks.

Some communities had nowhere left to throw all the snow. “We’ve got to put it somewhere,” said Ken MacNeil of the Public Works Department in Weymouth, Mass. “God put it here; God’s going to take it away somehow.”

It was the 12th storm of the season for the Northeast, and many snow-removal budgets were depleted. Massachusetts legislators were scheduled this week to consider state aid for many communities.

Airports in the Northeast resumed service Saturday, but some still had delays.

Boston’s Logan Airport had two runways operating, but many flights were canceled or delayed because aircraft were icebound in other cities.

In the New York metropolitan area, La Guardia and John F. Kennedy airports each had one runway open Saturday, while both runways were open at Newark, N.J., said Sgt. Stephen Prospero of the Port Authority, which operates the airports. Newark got a record 18 inches of snow Friday.

Thousands of travelers slept in airport terminals. Some had been trying to leave the city since Tuesday when an earlier storm dumped 10 inches on the area.

Baltimore-Washington International Airport had both main runways in use and flights were jammed with people whose previous flights had been canceled.

An Amtrak train with 135 passengers from Jacksonville, Fla., finally pulled into the capital Saturday after being stranded for 11 hours in Virginia because of frozen signals and ice-covered trees that fell on the tracks.

The Long Island Rail Road, the nation’s largest commuter rail system with 250,000 passengers on an average weekday, was offering only limited service Saturday.

As much as six inches of ice coated parts of Mississippi, and Greenville Mayor Frank Self said he barely recognized his own town.

“We look like Bosnia,” Self said of his city of 50,000 people. “There are very few streets you can go down. Every tree is broken down. It is a disaster.”

Tennessee officials estimated about 417,000 people statewide were still without power Saturday. The storm initially knocked out service to close to 800,000.

An estimated 200,000 customers were without power Saturday in Mississippi, down from 500,000, and 175,000 had no water, said Bo Robinson, public service commissioner for the northern part of the state.

About 250,000 customers were without power in Virginia, utilities reported, and National Guard troops were sent to help evacuate residents of blacked-out Caroline County. Thousands of other people were still without electricity Saturday in West Virginia, South Carolina, Arkansas, Maryland and Delaware.