New England Feels Wrath of Winter Storm

A powerful blizzard crashed with all its fury Sunday on New England, shutting airports, closing highways, flooding streets in coastal communities, knocking out power and dumping what in some areas appeared to be a record 24-hour snowfall.

The storm was accompanied by howling, hurricane-force winds that caused whiteout conditions and left snowdrifts that resembled frozen dunes. Ocean waves 30 feet high rolled over seawalls. Daytime temperatures averaged about 10 degrees, with windchill factors of about 10 below zero.

Rob Gilman, a meteorologist with New England Weather Science, a private service, said the storm’s final tally could break Boston’s snowfall record of 27 1/2 inches in a 24-hour period. Some areas around the city recorded more than 30 inches between Saturday and Sunday evenings. Squalls continued late Sunday, but most of the snow had subsided.

“This is a big event, the kind of thing that comes along once every 10 or 20 years,” said Gilman, who tracked winds of 93 mph at his office in Hull, about 20 miles southeast of Boston.

Gilman said a storm that moved in from the Pacific Ocean raced across the nation, piling a foot of snow in parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and northern Ohio. The Catskills in New York collected at least 20 inches of snow.

At least 13 deaths were linked to the weather: three each in Connecticut, Ohio and Wisconsin, two in Pennsylvania, and one each in Maryland and Iowa.

Gilman said the weather system redeveloped over the Atlantic -- strengthening off the island of Nantucket to bring maximum wind and snow to New England.

“This is a classic Nor’easter of one of the greater magnitudes,” he said. “It’s got all the earmarks of the kind of storm that has brought shipwrecks along the coast and tragedy for centuries.”

Most people heeded official warnings and remained indoors. Highways were deserted and in some cases shut down while plow crews waited out the storm before clearing the roads.

Still, Massachusetts operated under a state of emergency imposed late Saturday by Gov. Mitt Romney.

Gov. Donald L. Carcieri declared a state of emergency Sunday in Rhode Island, where snow fell in some areas at a rate of 3 to 4 inches an hour. New Jersey also had declared a state of emergency by the end of the day.

Connecticut Gov. M. Jodi Rell said the severe storm produced thousands of power outages in her state.

For much of the day, Boston’s public transit system was closed. Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino announced that city schools would be closed today and Tuesday. State and municipal offices also were to be closed today.

“People should stay inside,” Menino said. “Don’t go out unless you absolutely have to.”

Getting to or from Boston was impossible for anyone who planned to travel by plane. The whiteout conditions closed Logan International Airport. On a normal Sunday, airport spokesman Phil Orlandella said, about 450 flights come into Logan and the same number depart.

Standing in a deserted terminal, where every flight on every monitor read “canceled,” Orlandella said: “The Maytag repairman’s doing more work than we are right now.”

T.F. Green Airport in Providence, R.I., also was shut down because of the storm, as was Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Conn.

The storm had little effect on airports in Southern California, officials said Sunday.

At Los Angeles International Airport, officials said, a limited number of flights to the East Coast were delayed or canceled. No flights were canceled from John Wayne Airport in Orange County or from Bob Hope Airport in Burbank, officials said.

Officials at the three Northeastern airports said they hoped they would be reopened today.

Philadelphia’s airport reopened Sunday after the storm forced a shutdown on Saturday, stranding hundreds of travelers at the terminal overnight. Nearly 600 flights were canceled Saturday at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. By Sunday, O’Hare had resumed a regular flight schedule.

In Massachusetts, Romney summoned the National Guard to help evacuate several coastal towns southeast of Boston, where the storm’s force was particularly strong.

Residents in some sections of Scituate, about 30 miles southeast of Boston, were ordered to leave their homes after the morning high tide sent seawater 500 feet inland from the harbor.

Authorities had issued warnings about potential flooding because the raging winds blowing off the ocean coincided with a full moon and high tide.

Most residents left voluntarily, going to schools on high ground that were converted to emergency shelters.

“There’s a lot of self-evacuations going on,” said Peter Judge, spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.

Nantucket Island’s 6,000 year-round residents were without power most of Sunday, and about 25,000 people on Cape Cod also lost power.

In the seaside town of Hull, Polly Feinberg and Bob Platka said the storm made their oceanfront home feel like an igloo.

“All our windows on the north side are totally covered with salt water ice, and slush. It’s totally caked on,” Feinberg said. “It makes the house dark, but opaque -- it’s pretty eerie.”

Feinberg said their wind speed indicator clocked gusts at 70 mph.

“The whole house was vibrating,” she said.

Feinberg said her husband, an avid bicyclist, passed up his usual Sunday outing. But in Caribou, Maine, meteorologist Mark Bloomer slipped away from the National Weather Service station long enough to take a three-mile jog.

“It’s kind of refreshing, but the winds are a little brisk,” Bloomer said, explaining that it was “minus 2 degrees, warmer than it has been” at the weather outpost near the Canadian border. Bloomer said Maine’s coastal areas took the brunt of the storm for that state.

In New York City, the first blizzard of 2005 was wrapped up by midmorning. Brooklyn received 17 1/2 inches of snow, and more than 13 inches accumulated in Central Park in Manhattan, the National Weather Service reported.

All across the city, in every neighborhood, snowplows left walls of snow between the sidewalks and the streets.

“Disgusting,” said Miranda Ausberg as the 74-year-old former schoolteacher tried to cross 33rd Street and 7th Avenue. The corner crosswalk was almost ankle-deep in gray slush.

But Ausberg wasn’t complaining: “Thank goodness the sun came out and the snow has stopped.”

Snowboarder Barbara Lewis donned her shades as she whisked down a hill in the north part of Central Park.

“I’m not quite the right age to be out here,” said Lewis, 23, as she dragged her snowboard up the hill alongside young girls. “But I can’t afford to go anywhere this winter. So I’m doing it here, when I can, so I don’t lose my edge.”

Lucy Clarke, a clerk at Zabar’s delicatessen on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, said the storm allowed most of her family to sleep in, “because there was nowhere you could go.”

Subways, buses and airports in New York operated on reduced schedules, but Broadway theaters remained open. No shows were called off.

About 2,600 snow removers powered across every primary street in the city, and most secondary streets. Sanitation Commissioner John J. Doherty said that by today, the department would focus on clearing 314,000 crosswalks.

Mehren reported from Boston and Baum from New York.