Terrible gusts of icy wind swept across the northeast of the United States on Saturday January 29, paralyzing transport and the daily life of 70 million inhabitants. A state of emergency had been declared the previous evening for the states of New York and New Jersey. New York State Governor Kathy Hochul asked “to avoid at all costs” travel and warned against “a very serious storm” and “potentially deadly”. After his passage, there is currently only one victim: a woman found lifeless in her car, possibly frozen to death, according to Nassau County Chief Bruce Blakeman.
The National Weather Service (NWS) recorded wind gusts of 80 to 120 km / h and was still forecasting polar temperatures overnight from Saturday to Sunday.
Much of the New England region and the east of the country was under the brunt of a blizzard warning, dubbed “cyclone bomb” by the American weather. In New York, the deserted streets were battered by an icy wind, while there were at least 30 centimeters of snow on the sidewalks of the trendy Cobble Hill district of Brooklyn, and 60 cm on Long Island, north of the megalopolis, according to the governor. The parks of the megalopolis have seen an influx of toboggan and cross-country skiers.
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The train lines serving the northern suburbs of New York have been at a standstill all day. Further north still, in Massachusetts, some 90,000 homes were without electricity according to the poweroutage.us site around 8 p.m. (2 a.m. in mainland France).
As for airports in the northeast, some 3,500 flights were canceled on Saturday and more than a thousand already for Sunday, arriving in or departing from the country, according to the flight tracking site FlightAware. Even down south in usually tropical Florida, frost alerts have been issued.