From Appalachians to Philly, people get ready for heavy snow

The city is preparing for the first major snowstorm of the year, which could dump a foot of snow on the area and potentially cause coastal flooding.

While such conditions are hardly unprecedented in Washington, residents’ concerns about the city’s ability to handle it could seem justified, given what happened Wednesday evening and Thursday morning.

“It is an extremely large storm and it will last for 36 hours”, she said.

“A potentially crippling winter storm”, according to the National Weather Service, which forecasts heavy snow and high winds across the northern mid-Atlantic region, including Baltimore, Washington, Philadelphia and New York City.

Washington looks like the bull’s-eye of the blizzard, and New York City is just inside the slow-moving storm’s sharp northern edge, which means it is likely to see heavy accumulations, Uccellini said.

“We don’t want it to be too warm, because if it melts too quickly you can have flooding issues”, said Fisher. President Barack Obama wasn’t spared – his motorcade slowly weaved and skidded along icy streets to the White House.

Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano said there is a about to be “blizzard-like conditions”, but the county is ready with 100 plows and spreaders and has 28,000 tons of salt and 3,600 tons of sand. Already, several people have died in accidents on icy roads.

The storm is expected to miss northern New England. The Department of Sanitation will make sure the streets are well-salted and plowed by deploying 579 salt spreaders on Friday evening, and 1,650 plows when more than two inches of snow accumulate. People all across the East Coast are preparing for anywhere from an inch of snow to up to 2 feet in some places.

In an omen of what’s to come, the District of Columbia was virtually paralysed by a light dusting of snow on Wednesday night.

As of midday Thursday, the greater Washington metro area – from Fredericksburg, Virginia, northward, incorporating all of Maryland – was under a blizzard warning.

At least five states had declared emergencies by Thursday afternoon (local time), as the season’s first major Atlantic Coast storm started to move over the Mid-South before barrelling on an expected north and eastward course bringing up to two feet of snow to some areas. High wind speeds combined with snowfall could cause whiteout conditions in some states and the potential shutdown of highways and airports, AccuWeather reported.

Kentucky’s legislature cancelled its Friday session ahead of an expected 14 inches of snow.

Even the organizers of a snowball fight are nervous about the storm that’s expected to hit the nation’s capital.

Heaters, shovels and sleds sold at a frenzied pace at Strosniders Hardware in Silver Spring, Maryland.

“They know (the storm is) coming”, manager Roy Washington told CNN affiliate WJLA. About 2,400 Department of Sanitation employees will be working 12-hour shifts as of Friday morning.

The forecast there calls for snow starting to fall overnight Friday, with 7 to 15 inches possible by the end of the weekend.

Chrissy Wiginton, 35, who works as an editor at the Smithsonian, said her walk to work across the National Mall on Thursday morning raised questions about how well-prepared the city and federal government were.

Charlotte-Winter Storm Warning issued.