East Digs Out After Blizzard Leaves a Trail of Disruption

  Subway station stairs in New York, like this one on the L stop on First Avenue, about 4 a.m. Monday, were covered with snowAirports and railroads limped back to life, but thousands were still stranded. Roads remained glazed and city streets choked with snow. Subways and buses ran sporadically. Power was still out for thousands. Business was bad, and there were grim tales of people snowbound for hours in cars, buses and trains.  www.dominicanflash.com But the two-day blizzard that attacked the East Coast on Sunday, the worst in four years, was over by late Monday morning, churning to oblivion in the Canadian Maritimes and leaving a trail of disruption in a dozen states from the Carolinas to Maine. The New York area and the Northeast took the brunt of it. Knee-to-thigh-high snows were common, and officials said it would probably take days to dig out. But given the size and strength of the storm — it was New York City’s sixth-largest snowfall, accompanied by winds that gusted over 65 miles an hour — there were still a lot of streets to be plowed, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg acknowledged, as well as sales tax revenues to be recouped. But he rejected any notion that the city was somehow less prepared for this storm than for others past. “The world has not come to an end,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news briefing. “The city is going fine. Broadway shows were full last night. There are lots of tourists here enjoying themselves. I think the message is that the city goes on.”

The National Weather Service said the biggest snow accumulations in the area were in New Jersey, with 32 inches in Rahway, 31.8 inches in Elizabeth, 29 in Lyndhurst and 25 in many parts of the state. In New York City, 20 inches fell in Central Park, 24 in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and 22 in Bedford Park, the Bronx. In Orange County, N.Y., Tuxedo Park and Harriman had 26 inches.

New York was a city of apocalyptic silence in the morning. The choreography of traffic, commuter trains and pedestrian hordes was missing. In its place, a plow scraped by now and then and a car or two churned past on deserted thoroughfares. Cabs were a myth. Side streets were impassable, and people muffled to the eyes slogged over huge drifts and mountains of curbside snow, trying to keep their footing.

By late morning, the sun broke through and the skies cleared to pristine blue. Winds that had howled like banshees moderated through the day to cello velocities, and Central Park was a child’s dream of winter, with sledders, skiers and strollers out in the drifts, cutting trails to nowhere. Bizarrely, forecasters said temperatures in the New York area would climb to nearly 50 degrees by next weekend.

But it was an illusion that cloaked harsh realities. Millions of lives were out of sync, with people unable to get to work or to get home after the holiday weekend. Thousands were still stranded at airports and bus and train terminals, or staying in hotels. Some 4,000 flights had been canceled in the region, and even as airports began to reopen, the backlog was so great that officials said it might take days to catch up.

Tens of thousands of homes remained without power, their lines cut by high winds and toppling tree limbs. Utilities reported 60,000 customers without power in Massachusetts, 8,000 in New York City and Westchester County, 8,700 on Long Island and more than 8,000 in New Jersey.

Five deaths were reported in highway accidents in the storm, four in the Carolinas and one in Maine. Highways, even if plowed, remained icy and treacherous, and officials were still advising drivers to say off the roads and take mass transit. But mass transit was not always reliable in this storm. Several subway trains were marooned overnight after losing power, including two Manhattan-bound A trains at Aqueduct and Broad Channel on the Rockaways line in Queens, stranding hundreds of passengers in frigid carriages for nearly seven hours until rescue trains reached them around 8 a.m. It was a frightening and frustrating ordeal, but there were no reports of injuries. Elsewhere on the city subways, entire lines were shut down by the storm. The B, J, M, Z and No. 7 trains were suspended for much of the day, and D, F, L and Q trains did not operate in southern reaches of Brooklyn for hours. Blowing snow and drifts four feet high compounded equipment problems, delaying crews from reaching frozen switches and tracks. And many train operators were unable to get to work.

New York City Transit also reported more than 400 buses stuck in drifts overnight, and bus service was “uniformly bad” throughout the city, a spokesman conceded.