Richard Perry/The New York Times
In Jersey City, Jose Angelo, left, helped Isauro Palacios, a contractor from Belleville, N.J., as he loaded a new snow blower into the back of his truck Thursday as a snowstorm approached the region.
As heavy, wet snow started to blanket much of the Northeast on Friday morning, people rushed to stores to stock up on supplies, drivers lined up at gas stations to fill their tanks and local authorities from New York City to Maine started working to battle what forecasters said could be the biggest blizzard for some cities in a century.
National Weather Service
A satellite image taken at 10:15 p.m. Eastern time Thursday. Areas in blue indicate colder cloud tops or deeper cloud cover. The system over the Midwest and the system spread across the East are expected to merge on Friday.
Throughout the night and into the morning airlines announced the suspension of thousands of flights out of New York and Boston airports , as thousands of workers readied their plows, checked their stocks of salt and braced for what will most likely be a cold and busy weekend. Amtrak announced that it would suspend northbound service out of Penn Station in New York and southbound service out of Boston beginning early Friday afternoon.
Schools across New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island announced they would close, or dismiss students early on Friday.
On Long Island, where some forecasts said there could be more than 18 inches of snow, the power company, which has received heavy criticism for its response to Hurricane Sandy, promised customers that they were prepared.
The city of Boston, where forecasts called for more than two feet of snow to fall by Saturday, announced that it would close all schools on Friday, joining other localities in trying to get ahead of the storm and keep people off the roads.
“We are taking this storm very seriously and you should take this storm very seriously,” said Jerome Hauer, the New York State Commissioner of the Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, at an afternoon news conference.
“If you don’t have to go to work tomorrow, we suggest that you do not,” he said. “If you do, we suggest that you plan for an early departure.”
The latest forecasts, he said, called for between 12 and 20 inches of snow in the New York City region and wind gusts that could exceed 60 miles per hour.
However, with the storm still some distance away, forecasters warned that predictions could change. The first sign of the storm will be a dusting of light snow that is expected to start falling across the region Friday morning.
At some point Friday night, the arctic jet stream will drop down from Canada and intersect with the polar jet stream, which usually travels through the lower 48 states.
“They will cross somewhere between New Jersey and Nantucket,” said Tim Morrin, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service. “That is where the center of the storm will deepen and explosively develop.”
If the current models hold, the storm could rival the blizzard of 1978 in New England, when more than 27 inches of snow fell in Boston and surrounding cities. That storm, which occurred on a weekday, resulted in dozens of deaths and crippled the region for days.
Peter Judge, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, said more than 20 agencies had gathered at the agency’s operations center in Framingham, Mass., where they were preparing for a historic storm.
“From our perspective, this is a very severe, blizzard-type storm that we haven’t had for quite a long time,” Mr. Judge said. “Worst-case scenario, this will be the worst one that we’ve dealt with in many, many years. I can’t even come up with something comparable.”
Officials prepared for debris management, snow removal and supplies distribution, he said, as well as widespread power failures, which he said were the major concern. “People will lose their heat when they lose their power, and they’re certainly much more in harm’s way than at other times of the year,” he said.
Boston was bracing for the worst of the storm to hit between 2 and 5 p.m. Friday. Gov. Deval Patrick, who called the pending storm “a serious weather event,” has ordered all nonemergency personnel to work from home Friday and encouraged private employers to keep their workers home.
Flights and Trains Canceled as Storm Heads to Northeast
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Flights and Trains Canceled as Storm Heads to Northeast
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Flights and Trains Canceled as Storm Heads to Northeast
