Eastern Seaboard Lashed by Fierce Snow, Blackouts

A powerful storm that whipped along the Eastern Seaboard early Monday forced hundreds of trapped motorists into emergency shelters in North Carolina, left thousands without power in Massachusetts and snarled air traffic in and out of Boston.

Twelve to 18 inches of snow fell in eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island by Monday morning, according to the National Weather Service, and an additional 6 inches covered much of the terrain from northern New Jersey to southeastern Maine.

In North Carolina, authorities said icy road conditions might have caused the deaths of two motorists. In the eastern part of the state, officials in Nash County opened five emergency shelters Sunday night to house about 500 motorists trapped on I-95, the north-south interstate highway, as icy road conditions and 6 inches of snow caused traffic problems.

“The storm went right up the I-95 corridor” starting Sunday night, said Sgt. Everett Clendenin, spokesman for the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. “We’re just glad the storm was in a limited area and not a statewide event.”

Clendenin said as much as 11 inches of snow fell in some counties around Raleigh, the state capital, overnight Sunday.

Temperatures began to rise Monday, improving road conditions enough that those who sought shelter had hit the roads again by midafternoon, Clendenin said.

The storm also knocked out power to 14,000 customers in the eastern part of North Carolina, and to 16,000 customers in South Carolina.

About 14 inches of snow fell in eastern Virginia, and dozens of drivers skidded off roads coated with ice.

“We are just inundated with accidents,” state police Sgt. D.S. Carr told Associated Press.

In Massachusetts, the storm hit Cape Cod with unexpected fury Sunday night, bringing with it high winds and snow, said Christina McKenna, director of media relations for NSTAR , a power company serving eastern and central Massachusetts.

“We really got hammered on Cape Cod last night,” McKenna said. “The biggest culprit we have is heavy, wet snow on pine branches down there.”

At the height of the storm, McKenna said, 27,000 customers were without power. Crews struggled Monday to restore power, but snowdrifts were making it hard to reach some towns, she said.

“In parts of Cape Cod, there were upward of 14 inches of snow,” McKenna said. With snow still weighing down tree branches and power lines, McKenna said, “We had 7,000 customers in Provincetown who just lost their power this afternoon.”

The company had more than 100 crews operating in Cape Cod, she said, “but it is going to take time” to restore power. About 16,000 customers were still without power Monday, McKenna said, and some would not be restored before this afternoon.

The weather forced Logan International Airport in Boston to reduce operations to a single runway until late Monday morning, when a second was opened. Airport spokesman Phil Orlandella told Associated Press that the closure caused “substantial” flight delays.

The storm started in the Gulf of Mexico over the holiday weekend, said Walter Drag, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass.

“We had a large-scale storm system that brought unprecedented snowfall to South Texas that then left the Gulf of Mexico [on Sunday] and zoomed up the eastern coast,” Drag said.

The fierce weather missed most of the major urban centers but dropped as much as 18 inches of snow on Cape Cod, Drag said.

“What we had was a combination of events,” Drag said. “You hear a lot about the ‘lake effect’ in the Great Lakes -- we had the ocean effect here yesterday. It was cold enough over the ocean to form snow squalls that were small in scale but intense.

“So in some areas, there were 7 inches of snow dropped by the squalls before the actual storm started,” he said.

Then, through the night, “the snow fell furiously ... with strong, gale-force wind gusts between 40 and 50 mph,” he said.

The storm moved out of the New England area Monday, but temperatures dropped to near-record lows Monday night -- hovering between 5 in Providence, R.I., and minus 5 in Hartford, Conn., Drag said.