Brutal Cold Snap Chills the Spine of East Coast

Nose-numbing, lip-chapping cold gripped the eastern United States for a second straight day Tuesday, closing schools, delaying trains and actually making workers eager to get into the warm confines of their offices.

“I wish I could find a way to get home without going outside,” said Jeanette Cordero, who bundled up for a smoking break outside New York’s Paine Webber building.

In a whiplash reversal of conditions that were almost balmy a week ago, New York City’s temperatures hovered in the mid-teens with the wind chill gusting to 10 below at Kennedy Airport.

Conditions are not likely to improve, according to projections from a new supercomputer the National Weather Service began using Tuesday.

A low-pressure area developing off the Carolinas is expected to bring snow from Washington to New England on Thursday night, followed by brutally cold conditions on Friday and into Saturday, said Louis W. Uccellini, director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction.

He said snow totals could range from 2 inches around Washington to more than a foot on Long Island and to the north.

At Enosburg Falls, in northern Vermont, temperatures dipped to 38 below zero Tuesday. “Yup, we’re a little cool up here,” said Carolyn Stimpson, town clerk of Enosburg Falls, population 2,535. “It’s hard to breathe.”

In upstate Amsterdam, N.Y., fire destroyed a United Presbyterian Church as firefighters had difficulty battling flames in below-zero conditions.

Farther south, weather caused school and business closings or delays in North Carolina, South Carolina and West Virginia. The eastern part of North Carolina was blasted by 6 inches of snow.

Maine, which often contends for the appellation of coldest place in the continental United States, reported 21 below zero with no wind at Allagash and 4 below with a minus-35 wind-chill factor in Bangor.

“It was a bone-chiller,” said Art Lester from the National Weather Service in Gray, Maine.

More than 6,800 people stayed in shelters for the homeless Monday night, said Mitchell Netburn, first deputy commissioner of New York City’s Department of Homeless Services.

The weather service’s new 786 processor IBM SP computer can make 690 billion calculations per second. By September it will be speeded up to 2.5 trillion calculations per second.