HARTFORD, Conn. – As the third snowstorm in three weeks rolled up the East Coast early Wednesday, Josh Clukey realized he would have no choice but to venture out: His pregnant wife was showing signs of labor.
Sometime after midnight, the couple bundled up and left their home in Eastford for a hospital in Willimantic, normally a 25-minute trip. Instead it was a harrowing hour.
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“It was dark, and the snow was blowing all over the place. I drove really slow,” said Clukey, 24, whose son, Ryland James, was born a few hours after dawn. “There was maybe only about 6 inches on the roads at the time, but the plows hadn’t come out yet.”
Six inches was only the beginning. The storm buried parts of the Northeast in more than 2 feet of snow, smothering highways, halting trains and plunging thousands of homes and business into cold darkness.
The storm, which iced over much of the South before sweeping up the coast, wreaked havoc on transportation across southern New England.
In Massachusetts, Gov. Deval Patrick declared a state of emergency and mobilized the National Guard. He said the storm brought more snow and a wetter kind of snow than officials expected, leaving more than 100,000 people without power or heat by noon.
In New York, where city leaders took heavy criticism for their slow work after a Dec. 26 blizzard, officials rolled out a massive response that quickly cleared the streets.
They also received some help from nature, with only 9 inches of snow falling in Central Park — well short of 20 inches in last month’s storm.
The biggest complaint many New Yorkers could muster was that the constant scraping kept them up all night.
In the Bayside neighborhood of Queens, in an area where snowplows failed to visit for several days after Dec. 26, salt trucks or plows passed down one street at least nine times by late afternoon.
early afternoon in Connecticut, New Fairfield had 28 inches of snow, and Danbury had 24 inches.
The 22.5 inches recorded at Bradley International Airport set a one-day record for snowfall in the Hartford area.
But the storm had no chance of touching the previous one-day record for the state of 30 inches, set in 1888 in Middletown and matched in 1969 in Falls Village.
Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said at a news briefing that two deaths may be attributed to the storm.
Commuter rail service was delayed or suspended across the region, and Amtrak suspended service between New York City and Boston because of damage to the overhead power system south of Boston
.Scattered power outages were reported in Connecticut and Rhode Island.
As the storm swept north, the National Weather Service reported snow on the ground in every state except Florida.
That included Hawaii, which had 7 inches on the top of the Mauna Kea mountain.
“I think it has happened in the past, but it’s not very often that it happens,” said James Peronto of the weather service.
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