N.Y. Digs Out From Record Snow

A nor’easter enveloped New York City in dense, whirling snow on Sunday, sending Manhattanites out to convenience stores in ski goggles and depositing more than 26 inches of snow in Central Park -- the largest amount on record.

With thunder and lightning flashing through heavy snow, taxis wobbled down the empty streets of Greenwich Village.

Snowplows lumbered through snow that obscured vision. And all three metro New York airports temporarily shut down for the first time since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

At John F. Kennedy International Airport, a Turkish Airways flight skidded off a runway at 9:20 p.m. as it was landing, said Port Authority spokesman Steve Coleman. None of the 198 passengers were injured, he said.

Throughout the Northeast, an unusually warm January had lulled people into believing winter would fade away gently. As far north as Boston, suburban lawns remained green and joggers last week left their homes in shorts and T-shirts.

But Sunday’s storm hit the region with tremendous power. While the storm’s center hovered offshore above Atlantic waters, a narrow band of wind and snow slowly moved from the Washington area up the I-95 corridor, affecting the nation’s most densely populated stretch of land.

“We knew, winter always does come to New England,” said Kim Buttrick, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Taunton, Mass. “And usually it tends to hit us like a ton of bricks in February and March.”

New York and Connecticut took the brunt of the storm. The National Weather Service announced late Sunday that 26.9 inches had fallen in Central Park, beating the previous record of 26.4 inches, set in December 1947.

The damage extended south all the way to the Washington area, where snow knocked down power lines and left as many as 100,000 people without electricity. In the coming days, the storm could cause coastal flooding around Boston, Buttrick said.

Venturing out onto the street Sunday morning meant facing a bitter, stinging wind. Emma Blackburn, visiting New York from Birmingham, England, ducked into a coffee shop with a numb forehead and frozen hair. She had walked more than 35 blocks, but saw very little of the city around her.

“I was facing the ground the whole time,” said Blackburn, 18. “I kept bumping into people.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg -- aware, certainly, that slow snow removal had proven politically deadly for previous mayors -- met with reporters while the snow was still blowing horizontally outside.

He described waking up that morning to a noise “that didn’t make sense to me.”

“I thought, ‘Snow plows don’t make that noise,’ ” he said. “It was thunder.”

Bloomberg said he was confident that New York’s main streets would be cleared of snow by this morning’s rush hour.

By dawn on Sunday, the city had deployed 350 salt spreaders and 2,200 snowplows.

The city offered to pay citizens $10 an hour to shovel, and issued a stern warning to home- and business-owners: Four hours after the snowfall ends, sanitation workers will begin issuing $100 tickets to anyone who does not shovel sidewalks.

Scattered throughout the city were 20 snow-melting machines, each capable of melting 60,000 tons of snow per hour, to be drained through manholes into city sewers.

All told, removing snow from the city costs about $1 million per inch of snowfall -- but cost, Bloomberg said, was irrelevant beside the speed of cleanup. Late on Sunday, the city’s Education Department announced that schools would open at the regular time today.

“Rest assured, we will plow the streets and then figure out how to pay for it,” he said.

The storm was “a classic nor’easter,” said Harvey Thurm, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Long Island. It became far stronger after moving out over the Atlantic, positioning its intense northeast flank -- with winds of 40 to 50 mph and snow falling at a rate of 2 to 4 inches an hour.