Powerful winter storm slams US northeast as NYC issues travel ban

BBC:

A historic winter storm has started lashing the northeast US, placing 59 million people under weather warnings and causing power outages and a travel ban in New York City.

States of emergency have been declared in multiple US states including Massachusetts, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Rhode Island. Several have instituted restrictions or bans on travel due to the blizzard and thousands of flights have been cancelled.

Forecasters say much of the US northeast and the Canadian Maritimes will be impacted from Sunday evening to Monday.

It’s expected to be the most powerful nor’easter storm in nearly a decade for much of the region, bringing snow, fierce winds and coastal flooding.

About 40 million people are impacted by the blizzard warning, and another 19 million are under winter storm warnings, which covers the Central Appalachians to coastal Maine.

“While we do get plenty of these nor’easters that produce heavy snow and strong impacts, it’s been several years since we saw one of this magnitude across this large of a region in this very populated part of the country,” Cody Snell, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center, told the BBC’s US partner CBS News.

Already, power outages are mounting with more than 20,000 without electricity in New Jersey. Thousands more are without power in Virginia, Delaware and Maryland, according to the tracking website PowerOutage.us.

About 3,900 US flights have been cancelled on Sunday and hundreds of others have been delayed, according to flight-tracking website FlightAware.

The National Weather Service has warned that the storm will bring an estimated 2-3 inches (.05-.07m) could fall per hour during the storm, and snowfall can reach 1-2 feet (0.3-0.6m), resulting in “nearly impossible” travel conditions.

The blizzard conditions will also make travel “extremely treacherous” in parts of the northeast US, the service said.