At least 24 killed in massive blizzard in US

Tom Aloi, who works in construction management, was at Chicago O’Hare trying to get back to New York City after a business trip to Germany.

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority had suspended operations yesterday. The Capitol complex in Harrisburg and the Philadelphia and Reading state office buildings were closed for non-essential employees.

However, some residents said they just couldn’t resist seeing famous monuments frosted with snow.

“In Delaware, flooding closed a popular route to the state’s beaches and forced about a dozen people to leave the low-lying community of Oak Orchard”.

“For us, snow is like a normal winter”, said Viola Rogacka, 21, a fashion model from Poland, walking with a friend through New York’s Times Square. “It’s how it should look like”.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio said this morning that today would be a major cleanup day. “But we’ve come through it pretty well”, de Blasio said on ABC’s Sunday program “This Week”.

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A mammoth blizzard that paralyzed Washington and set a single-day snowfall record in New York City gave way Sunday to brilliant sunshine and gently rising temperatures, enabling millions to dig out and enjoy the winter.

In Brooklyn, only one teacher at the Bedford-Stuyvesant New Beginnings Charter School called out, despite more than two feet of snow in the city.

Four people died while shovelling snow in Queens, Delaware and Staten Island and two died of hypothermia in Virginia.

Peter Hoeppe, head of reinsurer Munich Re’s Geo Risks research unit, said in a statement that it was too early to estimate possible losses from the storm.

Heavy snow caused Washington DC to declare a “snow emergency”, closing its transport system over the weekend, and New York City banned all road travel, cancelled bus services and shut overground parts of the subway.

Mr Cuomo thanked New Yorkers for their patience as the winter storm slammed the region.

The Metro-North rail line, which serves suburbs north and east of New York City, was restored on Sunday afternoon and was operating on a Sunday schedule. Crews were working on Sunday to remove snow from an intersection near train tunnels to Manhattan. New York City’s expected total was upped Friday to a foot or more. In past storms, including hurricanes and blizzards, the court also remained open, even hearing oral arguments. Cars parked in neighborhoods around the region were encased in snow, some of it pushed from the streets by plows.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican presidential contender, left the campaign trail to oversee the emergency response in his snowbound state, where he said there were 90,000 power outages. “We’re just going to walk around, see some snow covered D.C. landmarks”.

The National Weather Service said 17.8 inches (45.2 cm) fell in Washington, tying as the fourth-largest snowfall in the city’s history.

Roofs collapsed on a Pennsylvania church, a Virginia theater and a barn outside Frederick, Maryland, which got 33.5 inches of snow, killing some cows. Hundreds of flights were canceled Monday, and Amtrak offered fewer trains than usual along the northeast corridor. She said crews had worked all night and Sunday on plowing main roads and were just now getting to secondary roadways and neighborhoods. In Washington D.C, government offices and schools remain closed Monday.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin was on a rescheduled pre-dawn flight from Springfield, Illinois, to Chicago while on the way to Washington on Monday morning.

“I have a lot of people on the list (who want shoveling) but I have yet to have any kids sign up to work today”, said the owner, Tracy Stannard. Her 3-year-old daughter, also in the vehicle, was in critical condition, The Record reported.

“They all turned on me, as teenagers will do”, she told Reuters Television.

Among New York-area airports, John F. Kennedy International, Newark Liberty and LaGuardia were open, with limited flight activity yesterday, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said. The fatalities occurred in Arkansas, Kentucky, New York, North Carolina, Maryland and Virginia, while more than 200,000 people were left without power at the height of the storm.

Further north, barrier islands near Atlantic City were also experiencing significant tidal flooding, said Linda Gilmore, the county’s public information officer.