Massive Blizzard Clobbers Northeast

Photo credit: Newsday/John Paraskevas | Snowbound vehicles remain stranded along Route 347 in Lake Grove. (Feb. 9, 2013) 

BOSTON (AP) – A storm that forecasters warned could be a blizzard for the history books, with a potential for up to 3 feet of snow, clobbered the New York-to-Boston corridor on Friday, grounding flights and knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of customers across the Northeast.

By Friday evening, more than 14 inches of snow had fallen in Belmont, Mass., just northwest of Boston, and more than 13 inches covered parts of northeastern Connecticut. Throughout the Northeast, about 350,000 homes and businesses lost electricity as wet, heavy snow, freezing rain and howling winds caused havoc.

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Earlier, as meteorologists warned of the impending blizzard conditions, shoppers from New Jersey to Maine crowded into supermarkets and hardware stores to buy food, snow shovels, flashlights and generators, something that became a precious commodity after Superstorm Sandy in October. Others gassed up their cars, another lesson learned all too well after Sandy. Across much of New England, schools closed well ahead of the first snowflakes.

“This is a storm of major proportions,” Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said. “Stay off the roads. Stay home.”

The wind-whipped snowstorm mercifully arrived at the start of a weekend, which meant fewer cars on the road and extra time for sanitation crews to clear the mess before commuters in the New York-to-Boston region of roughly 25 million people have to go back to work. But it could also mean a weekend cooped up indoors.

Rainy Neves, a mother of two in Cambridge, just west of Boston, did some last-minute shopping at a grocery store, filling her cart to the brim.

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Parts of Long Island recieved up to 30 inches of snowfall .I even saw a few lighting flashes yesterday evening.

I feel bad for those people who lost power,it don’t take to long for a house to get real cold.On Long Island have I never seen such ‘giant snowflakes’ coming down like that with such intensity for a prolonged period of time, it was crazy.Driving in it was definitely an experience, I could barely see the road ahead of me.To see how much snow fell across long Island click here.