A snowstorm hit much of the northeastern United States overnight from Thursday to Friday, crippling air and road transport and schools in the morning already disrupted by the Covid-19 epidemic .
From the White House in Washington to the northeastern states bordering Canada, the snow cover is in places over 30 cm thick, such as in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, in the states of New England, according to the weather website AccuWeather.
Pictures of postcards, the famous Brooklyn Bridge and Times Square in the heart of New York were covered with snow in the early morning, in a rare silence in the metropolis of nine million inhabitants.
Immediate consequences of this storm called “cyclone bomb”, some 830 flights were canceled in the region, according to the site FlightAware.
In New York alone, LaGuardia airport has already canceled more than a third of its scheduled flights this Friday and JFK airport announced, on its Twitter account, 221 grounded on Friday. Same thing at Boston airport.
Snowfall and inclement weather are expected to last until 10:00 p.m. (03:00 GMT Saturday), according to the US Weather Service (NWS).
In New York, especially in the north and north of the megalopolis, snowplough trucks were deployed early in the morning to clear the streets and roads of Queens or Westcheter County, where up to 30 cm of snow.
“It’s not a blizzard that’s going to stop us,” New York City mayor Eric Adams exclaimed in the New York Post.
To prevent any risk of accident on the roads, the transport services of the State of New York asked Friday morning to travel by car only in case of “necessity”. The governor of the neighboring state of New Jersey Phil Murphy had, on Thursday evening, issued an order declaring a “state of emergency”.
As is often the case during snowfall, public schools are mostly closed on Friday, adding to the list of administrations, public services, banks, businesses and businesses disrupted by the resurgence of the epidemic of Covid-19 due to the Omicron variant.