A powerful storm swept fast and furiously across the Northeast on Saturday, dumping mountains of snow, forcing hundreds of motorists to abandon their cars at the height of the blizzard and knocking out power for hundreds of thousands of people.
The storm played out the way many forecasters said it would — with New York City spared the worst, and points to the north and east hit harder.
With the storm still raging on Saturday morning, officials in Massachusetts ordered the evacuation of some communities along the coast as waves lashed the shoreline and high tide brought a surge of water inland.
MayorMichael R. Bloombergof New York, at a Saturday morning news conference, offered to help neighboring states.
“They have gotten an enormous amount of snow, and the snow continues to come down,” he said.
Most of the roads in the city, he said, were well on the way to being cleared and he thanked people for staying off the roads during the storm.
“I think it is fair to say we were very lucky,” he said.
Through the night, winds gusted with hurricane force in some places, downing power lines and creating white-out conditions. More than three feet of snow fell in parts of Connecticut, and more than two feet were reported on Long Island and in Massachusetts.
States of emergency were declared in four states on Friday. The governor of Massachusetts banned travel on all roads as night fell, an order that remained in effect on Saturday. In Connecticut, where the governor had ordered no cars on state highways on Friday night, residents were told early Saturday morning to stay off all roads.
On Long Island, the storm descended so quickly that hundreds of drivers who were trying to beat the nor’easter home on Friday night were forced to abandon their cars on the highways and streets as roads became impassable.
Snowplow drivers worked furiously to clear roads, but the snow limited what they could do.
“It’s really hard right now, it’s wet, it’s heavy and it’s freezing, so everything is going slow,” said Jack Mandaneza, 31, as he took a break from plowing on the Long Island Expressway at the height of the storm.
“This has been a record breaking storm,” Gov. Dannel P. Malloyof Connecticut said on Saturday. He said there were cars stranded across his state, too, and that rescuers were working to dig them out. There were several people who needed to be treated for hypothermia after spending hours trapped in their cars, he said.
The storm’s impact was felt by more than 40 million people, from northern New Jersey to Maine.
In Massachusetts, state officials said at a briefing on Saturday morning that the most immediate problem was moving people out of homes where they had lost power. National Guard soldiers had been deployed, mainly in the southeastern part of the state, to retrieve people and take them to warming centers and shelters. National Guard troops were assisting with evacuations in part of Salisbury, north of Boston, after a wave crashed into a home there, and in Hull, on the south shore of the state, as well as other south shore towns like Marshfield, Scituate and Weymouth.
“We had pre-positioned National Guard troops and equipment vehicles, basically along the south coast from the town of Hull, all the way to Cape Cod, the town of Sandwich,” said Peter Judge, of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.
But even some members of the Guard were trapped at home; only about 2,000 soldiers of a force of more than 5,000 were able to respond initially.
As high tide wore on Saturday morning, the National Weather Service posted multiple preliminary reports of flooding. Two feet of water were observed in Winthrop, Mass., just north of Boston. Waters breached a sea wall in the Humarock section of Scituate, while roads in Gloucester, Marblehead, and Revere were reported flooded or impassable.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 9, 2013
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Winthrop, Mass. It is north of Boston, not south.
Heavy Snow and Winds Batter Northeast
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Heavy Snow and Winds Batter Northeast
