New Yorkers are drinking tea with honey, hot chocolate with marshmallow fluff, hot coffee with brown sugar and cinnamon . . . anything hot they can get their hands on, basically, because it is snowing in the Big Apple.
The white stuff was falling at a rate of up to three inches per hour in New York City, New Jersey and nearby Pennsylvania and other states in America’s Northeast and according to multiple meteorologists, is likely to keep falling until sometime Tuesday or possibly even Wednesday.
The storm is being generated by a system that began on the West Coast in California, charged through Chicago, took a swing through Washington and is now hitting Philadelphia, New York, New Jersey and the tri-state area.
All COVID-19 vaccination appointments have been cancelled and rescheduled in New York City and New Jersey, as well as in Rhode Island and Connecticut.
The Big Apple could see between 12 to 18 inches of snow, according to NBC News meteorologist Bill Karins, who said this could be the biggest snowstorm in the past five years. The New York office of the National Weather Service has forecast up to 21 inches of snow in Central Park, Karins said.
A state of emergency was declared early in the day by New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and by New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, with both saying that due to prevailing conditions, vaccination sites in their areas would be closed on Monday.
“We expect this storm to have much more snow in store,” Murphy said in a statement posted to his Twitter account. “Conditions today may well be very dangerous. It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
“Please, just stay in and stay off the roads. Let our road crews, power crews and our first responders have the roads to themselves.”
Hundreds of commercial flights along the Eastern Seaboard were canceled due to stormy conditions, stranding thousands of travelers. Millions more canceled ground travel plans as Interstate 95 and similar major highways became slippery and dangerous all along the coast.
Local officials prepared for massive power outages while implementing public transportation snow day plans to drop thousands of tons of rock salt and deploy thousands of dump trucks and snowplows to keep the major arteries clear.
In New York City, side streets were not plowed overnight and into the early hours of the day; city hall asked residents to please stay home to allow public works personnel to clear the roads.
Blizzard-like conditions were forecast for the New England states, with wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour and up to a foot of snow expected to accumulate by Monday night.
Scattered freezing rain was forecast in local areas along the Interstate-95 corridor all the way from Washington to Philadelphia.