Neighbors, government workers and a powerful railroad snow-clearing machine nicknamed “Darth Vader” scrambled to dig out from a brutal and — in some areas — record-breaking storm that blanketed the northeastern United States with snow, causing thousands of flights to be cancelled.
Even as the snow moved north Tuesday, giving way to sunshine in parts of the region, National Weather Service forecasters warned another storm originating in the Great Lakes was right around the corner.
Monday’s storm, which meteorologists are calling the strongest in a decade, dumped more than 2 feet (60 centimeters) of snow in parts of the metropolitan Northeast.
By Tuesday, roads were beginning to reopen, mass transportation was coming back online in some cities and power had returned for some of the hundreds of thousands that had lost electricity in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware and Rhode Island.
NYC will soon deploy snow-melting hot tubs
Known as snow melters, the massive basins of warm water are used by city workers to dump large quantities of snow and ice, accelerating the clearing process. They will soon roll out in all five boroughs, acting Sanitation Commissioner Javier Lojan said Tuesday.
The tubs helped melt 23 million pounds (11.5 metric tons) of snow during the previous storm that hit the city last month.
Power restoration across southeastern Massachusetts will take days
About 230,000 customers remain without power, including roughly 164,000 on Cape Cod and 60,000 in the Plymouth–New Bedford area, said Doug Foley, president of Eversource’s Massachusetts electric operations.
“It will take days. This is a multi-day restoration,” Foley said during a streamed press conference in Yarmouth and Tuesday. “The last customers, unfortunately, will be a couple days out.”
Source: WPLG
