Frigid temperatures this weekend prompt cold weather advisories

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By CHRIS HAWLEY and MEGHAN BARR, Associated Press


      NEW YORK (AP) - When Angela Madsen was pulled off her plane and
her wheelchair stayed on board, she knew she was in for a rough
night. The paraplegic athlete struggled to get into the bathrooms
at Kennedy Airport. Turning the wheels on her borrowed wheelchair
strained her shoulders. Sleeping was impossible.


      "I actually got out of it and laid on the floor," Madsen said.


      It was, she said, a miserable time - one that was shared by
millions of people on Monday, in travails big and small, serious
and surreal, after the blizzard of December 2010 sucker-punched the
northeastern U.S. during one of the busiest travel days of the
year.


      Air travel in the nation's busiest, most crowded airspace nearly
shut down, and thousands of stranded passengers turned terminals
into open-air hotels while they waited for planes to take off and
land on plowed runways.


      A tractor-trailer skidded off a road and smashed into a house in
Maine. A woman went into labor on a New Jersey highway, causing a
traffic jam that stranded 30 vehicles. Rails on the normally
reliable New York subway shorted out. Winds topping 65 mph ripped
power lines, leaving tens of thousands of people in the dark across
New England.


      This storm simply didn't play fair, cold-cocking the Northeast
with more than 2 feet of snow on a holiday weekend when everyone
seemed to be out of town, groggy with holiday cheer or just
unprepared.


      In New York, outer-borough residents complained of a sluggish
response by snow plow crews who still hadn't finished clearing the
streets. State Sen. Carl Kruger, a Democrat who represents
Brooklyn, called the city's response a "colossal failure." Fire
officials said the unplowed streets and abandoned cars made it
harder to respond to emergencies, including a five-alarm,
wind-whipped blaze at a Queens apartment building Monday night.


      A testy Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended the city's cleanup
effort, saying the crews were being slowed down by abandoned cars
on the streets.


      "There's no reason for everybody to panic," he said. "Our
city is doing exactly what you'd want it to do."


      After spending Sunday night tossing and turning on airport
floors, thousands of bleary-eyed travelers spent Monday standing in
lines, begging for flights, fighting for taxis and hunting for
hotel rooms.


      The storm wreaked havoc on almost every form of conveyance: from
the buses at the nation's busiest terminal near Times Square to the
region's usually punctual commuter trains.


      Little problems quickly snowballed: On New Jersey's Garden State
Parkway, a motorist struggled to find the shoulder of the road
after his wife went into labor, causing a traffic jam that
eventually stranded 30 vehicles, state trooper Chris Menello said.
Among them were two buses full of people returning from Atlantic
City.


      Two of New York's major airports - LaGuardia and John F. Kennedy
International - began to receive inbound flights on Monday night.
Newark Liberty was expected to start receiving inbound flights
early Tuesday. Nearly 1,500 total flights were canceled at all
three airports.


      "Everyone was clapping toward the end," said Patrick Wacker,
37, aboard an Air Canada flight from Toronto that was the first to
land at LaGuardia at about 7:40 p.m. Monday. Wacker had been
stranded in Toronto for a day while trying to get back to New York
after visiting his parents in Frankfurt, Germany.


      Across the region, the storm's aftermath was punctuated by
surreal moments, like the sight of Adrian Traylor, 29, roaming the
Newark airport terminal in a Scottish kilt and bare legs as
subfreezing winds howled outside.


      Traylor, who lives in Scotland, was on his way to visit
relatives in Las Vegas and said he wore the kilt to impress his
family.


      "I didn't think I'd be wearing it this long," he said.


      In Newport, Maine, 81-year-old Marguerite Fowler and her husband
were asleep when an 18-wheeler full of tree bark lost control on an
icy road at 2:10 a.m. and obliterated their home's sun room.


      "I thought it was a bomb," Fowler said. "We don't need all
that excitement at our age."


      Christopher Mullen returned from sunny Cancun, Mexico, to find
his car buried in the snow in long-term parking at New York's
Kennedy airport. After trying to dig it out and getting soaked in
the process, he finally gave up and took the subway - which
promptly broke down.


      Mullen and his girlfriend spent eight hours in a freezing subway
car, shivering under a thin blanket.


         The storm was New York City's sixth worst since 1869, when
records began, said Adrienne Leptich, a meteorologist with the
National Weather Service.


      A Feb. 11-12, 2006, storm dropped 26.9 inches of snow on Central
Park, breaking the previous record, set in 1947, by half an inch.
The storm that hit the city Sunday left 20 inches of snow in
Central Park.


      The storm spared no one, not even men who travel on ice for a
living. A bus carrying the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team got
stuck in the blizzard for four hours while trying to return to
their hotel after a game against the New Jersey Devils. And,
members of the U.S. luge team lost two days of training after they
were stranded on their way to Koenigssee, Germany.

      In Philadelphia, pedestrians dodged chunks of ice blown off
skyscrapers. New York taxi driver Shafqat Hayat struggled to get
his car moving Monday after spending the night trapped on an
unplowed street.


      "I've seen a lot of snow before, but on the roads, I've never
seen so many cars stuck in 22 years," Hayat said.


      Some travelers tried to make the best of it. At the Newark
airport, Frank Mann, his son 9-year-old son Stephen and his
girlfriend Jackie Douglas said their night on the terminal floor
was sort of like taking a camping trip.


      They made beds out of luggage trays turned upside down, ate hot
dogs from the snack bar and even did some bird-watching: pigeons
seeking refuge from the elements were taking baths in puddles of
water dripping from the ceiling.


      "This airport becomes a whole different place at night," said
Mann, a 53-year-old lawyer from Houston.


      When things got boring, Stephen pulled out his Kindle to finish
a book he had started before getting stranded.


      The book was about another youngster stranded far from home by
bad weather: L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.


      Hawley reported from Newark, N.J. Contributing to this report
were Associated Press writers Glen Johnson in Haverhill, Mass,;
David Sharp in Portland, Maine; Leon Drouin-Keith, Sara Kugler
Frazier, Samantha Gross, Samantha Henry, Karen Matthews, Adam
Pemble and David Porter in New York; Deepti Hajela in Fort Lee,
N.J.; George Walsh in Albany, N.Y., and Geoff Mulvihill in
Haddonfield

Gallery

Storm strands buses, planes, trains on East Coast

East Coast blizzard causing cancellations at Mpls.-St. Paul airport

Weather and Climate News

Air travel in the nation's busiest, most crowded airspace nearly
shut down, and thousands of stranded passengers turned terminals
into open-air hotels while they waited for planes to take off and
land on plowed runways.

Many still stranded by trains, planes after Northeast storm

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