'Bomb cyclone' rocks eastern US killing at least four
The Mayor of New York declares a state of emergency as thousands of flights are cancelled. Snow plows and salt trucks rumble along roads and highways, and the city's two main airports halt flights due to whiteout conditions.
Residents are evacuated via a humvee as flood waters rises as a massive winter storm bears down on the region on January 4, 2018 in Scituate, Massachusetts.
A giant winter "bomb cyclone" walloped the US east coast on Thursday with heavy snow and freezing cold that made for treacherous travel conditions and bone-chilling misery.
Four people were reported killed in the southeastern states of North and South Carolina, where icy roads sent vehicles skittering.
The National Weather Service said early on Friday that very cold temperatures and wind chills will follow for much of the eastern third of the US through the weekend.
A cold wave gripping a large section of the United States had already been blamed for a dozen deaths.
Thousands of flights were cancelled and schools closed in many localities as snow piled up and blizzard conditions began taking hold in the northeast.
Journalist Chris Pollone has the latest from Boston.
Blizzard warning
"I don't know where I'll stay tonight if I get stuck, probably with my boss," said Ran Richardson, 55, of Malden, Massachusetts, as he waited for a Boston subway to take him to training for his job as a Chinese-English translator.
Schools were ordered closed in New York City, many parts of New Jersey, Boston and elsewhere throughout the region.
A garbage truck with a plow clears the street during a snowstorm in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, on January 4, 2018.
Blizzard warnings were in effect along the east coast from North Carolina to Maine. The National Weather Service forecast winds as high as 113 km per hour, which downed power lines.
Some 65,000 homes and businesses in the northeast were without power, though that number was expected to rise as the storm intensified across the region.
More than a foot of snow was forecast for Boston and coastal areas of northern New England, with as much as 3 inches per hour forecast, a pace that made it difficult for plow crews to keep roads clear. Officials feared that fast-dropping temperatures after the storm passed would turn remaining snow on roadways to ice.
Flooding
High tides also caused flooding in parts of coastal Massachusetts, with seawater rising near buildings, including a hotel and along Boston's historic Long Wharf, a popular tourist attraction.
The water tied a four-decade-old flood record, the National Weather Service's office said.
Drivers make their way along the flooded Beach Road after the ocean overtopped the seawall during a winter snowstorm in the Boston suburb of Lynn, Massachusetts, on January 4, 2018.
Live television images showed multiple fire trucks responding to the area. Boston Fire Department officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The storm was powered by a rapid plunge in barometric pressure that some weather forecasters were referring to as bombogenesis or a "bomb cyclone" and which brought fast, heavy snowfall and high winds.
The bombogenesis phenomenon occurs when a storm's barometric pressure drops 24 millibars in 24 hours. The wintry weather has been blamed for at least 13 deaths in the past few days, including three fatalities in North Carolina traffic accidents and three in Texas due to cold.
Thousands of flights cancelled
More than 3,500 US airline flights were canceled.
New York's John F Kennedy International Airport and LaGuardia Airport temporarily halted all flights due to whiteout conditions, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
At those airports, the metropolitan area's third major airport in Newark, New Jersey, and Boston's Logan International Airport, as many as three out of four flights were called off, according to tracking service FlightAware.com.
Travelers arrive at the Delta Airlines terminal at LaGuardia Airport during Storm Grayson in New York City, New York, on January 4, 2018.
Passenger train operator Amtrak was running reduced service in the Northeast. Sporadic delays were reported on transit systems, including New York state's Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North commuter lines, as well as the Boston area's Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) system.
"The MBTA is always going to have problems because so much of its track is outdoors," said Mitchell Moss, a professor of urban policy and planning at New York University who is an expert on transit issues. Frozen switches and high winds interfere with above-ground train operations, he said.
Officials reported road accidents throughout the northeast, including in Manchester, New Hampshire, where a 32-year-old woman crashed a vehicle through the wall of a nursing home, according to local police. No one was injured in the incident.
The storm's impact extended to eastern Canada.
In the Southeast, historic cities saw their heaviest snowfall in nearly 30 years on Wednesday, according to AccuWeather.com senior meteorologist Alan Reppert. Charleston, South Carolina, received 5.3 inches of accumulation, within an inch of its record.
Thursday's power outages raised fears that people would be left without electricity and heat on Friday and during the weekend when temperatures are forecast to plunge.
"Due to strong wind gusts, any power outages are expected to be prolonged because bucket trucks cannot withstand the winds," Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy told reporters.
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