New Englanders savaged by a blizzard packing knee-high snowfall and hurricane-force winds began digging out as New Yorkers and others spared its full fury questioned whether forecasts were overblown.
The storm buried the Boston area in more than 2 feet of snow and lashed it with howling winds that exceeded 70 mph. It punched a gaping hole in a seawall and swamped a vacant home in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and flipped a 110-foot replica of a Revolutionary War ship in Newport, Rhode Island, snapping its mast and puncturing its hull.
WOW! Vehicles buried with snow Tuesday night in Boston, Massachusetts. Photo: Josh Haskell. #BLIZZARDof2015 #Boston pic.twitter.com/SACWmgAmdB
— Mark Tarello (@mark_tarello) January 28, 2015
“I had to jump out the window because the door only opens one way,” Chuck Beliveau said in the hard-hit central Massachusetts town of Westborough. “I felt like a kid again. When I was a kid, we’d burrow through snow drifts like moles.”
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With the storm drawing near, the governor banned all non-essential travel, and the mayor ordered city schools closed for two days.
“So far, so good,” Tufts University political science professor Jeffrey Berry said. “What’s important for a governor or a mayor is to appear to be in charge and to have a plan to finish up the job and to get the city and the state back to work.”
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Associated Press writers Patrick Whittle in Portland, Maine; Michelle R. Smith in Providence; Rhode Island; Steve LeBlanc and Sylvia Lee Wingfield in Boston; Amy Crawford in Westborough, Massachusetts; Pat Eaton-Robb in Columbia, Connecticut; Jennifer Peltz, Kiley Armstrong, Ula Ilnytzky and Verena Dobnik in New York; Shawn Marsh in Trenton, New Jersey; Jill Colvin in Jersey City, New Jersey; Geoff Mulvihill in Haddonfield, New Jersey; and Sean Carlin, Michael Sisak and Kathy Matheson in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
