Thousands of US Flights Cancelled as Eastern States Brace for Massive Blizzard
TEHRAN (Tasnim) - A massive blizzard is barreling toward the eastern United States, with forecasters predicting that more than 0.6 meters of snow will fall in Washington and a state of emergency was declared in five states and the district of Columbia.
The National Weather Service described the storm, which is expected to continue from late Friday until Sunday, as "potentially crippling" for a swath of the country's northeast.
Schools and government offices were being closed, thousands of flights have been cancelled, and food and supplies have disappeared from grocery and hardware stores. Basketball games and concerts have also been postponed.
Washington's subway system announced that it would shut down entirely from Friday night and remain closed throughout Sunday for the sake of employee and rider safety. Underground stations usually stay open during major snowstorms.
The director of the National Weather Service said that all the ingredients had come together to create blizzards with brutally high winds, dangerous inland flooding, white-out conditions and even the possibility of thunder snow, when lightning strikes through a snowstorm, Al Jazeera reported.
The snowfall could easily cause more than $1bn in damage and paralyse the eastern third of the nation, weather service director Louis Uccellini said.
Washington looks like the 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.
On Thursday, states of emergency were declared in Tennessee, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and parts of other states, where road crews were out in force.
Blizzard warnings or watches were also in effect along the storm's path, from Arkansas through Tennessee and Kentucky to the mid-Atlantic states and as far north as New York.
The flight tracking site FlightAware estimated that airlines would cancel at least 2,000 flights on Friday and another 3,000 on Saturday. By Sunday afternoon, however, the airlines hoped to be back to full schedule.
