Air travel in the nation’s busiest, most crowded airspace nearly shut down completely after the storm socked the Northeast with more than 2 feet of snow on a holiday weekend when Americans all seemed to be traveling or just unprepared.
A tractor-trailer skidded off a road and smashed into a house in Maine. A woman went into labor on a New Jersey highway, causing a traffic jam that stranded 30 vehicles.
Rails on the normally reliable New York subway shorted out.
Winds topping 65 mph ripped power lines, leaving tens of thousands of people in the dark across New England.
Flights slowly resumed at the airports, although experts said it would likely take several more days to rebook all the displaced passengers. Two of New York’s major airports — LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy International — began to receive inbound flights on Monday night, while Newark began receiving inbound flights Tuesday morning. Nearly 1,500 total flights were canceled at all three airports.
The words “on time” lit up at least half the departure boards early Tuesday at LaGuardia, where passengers stretched out sleeping under blankets along the windowsill of a food court.
Passengers crammed into airports in other cities on Tuesday hoping for a chance to reach their destinations. At Chicago Midway International Airport, lines stretched around inside and out in the cold as weary travelers got there early in the hope of getting on a flight. More than 225 flights were canceled Monday in Chicago.
The storm, which dumped 20 inches of snow in Central Park Sunday, was New York City’s sixth-worst since record-keeping began in 1869, said Adrienne Leptich, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. A Feb. 11-12, 2006, storm dropped 26.9 inches of snow on Central Park, breaking the previous record, set in 1947, by half an inch. The storm that hit the city Sunday left 20 inches of snow in Central Park.
