BOSTON — Call it Boston’s latest Big Dig.
Residents of Massachusetts woke up Wednesday to cars buried in several feet of snow, and secondary roads that remain covered in snow and narrowed by high snowbanks.
But life is slowly returning to normal after a blizzard that left three feet of snow in some towns.
TRAVEL
A ban on non-essential travel has been lifted and Boston-area highways filled with traffic for the Wednesday morning commute.
The MBTA resumed rail service, although weather-related delays on almost all subway and commuter rail lines were reported. Buses also started running again, although many routes were delayed or detoured, again because of snow.
Logan International Airport reopened for incoming flights at about 8 a.m., and Amtrak service out of Boston resumed.
POWER OUTAGES
Electric utilities were reporting more than 11,000 homes and businesses still without power Wednesday morning.
NStar has about 6,000 customers in the dark, mostly on Cape Cod and in South Shore communities.
National Grid had about 5,000 outages, mostly on Nantucket, where more than 4,600 customers had no power. That was an improvement over the height of the storm on Tuesday when virtually the entire island, including its hospital, was without power.
The utilities combined have almost 2.5 million customers in Massachusetts.
SNOWFALL RECORD
The National Weather Service reported that the 33.5 inches of snow that fell in Worcester is the highest amount recorded since 1905.
The 24.4 inches at Boston’s Logan International Airport is the sixth-highest in recorded history. The record is 27.6 inches in 2003.
The weather service also confirmed Wednesday that the storm was officially a blizzard. A blizzard is defined as a storm in which falling or blowing snow reduces visibility to below one-quarter of a mile with winds that gust to 35 miles per hour or more.
According to unofficial snowfall totals reported to the weather service, the Massachusetts towns of Hudson, Auburn and Lunenburg all received exactly three feet of snow, the most in the state.
MORE SNOW?
The misery isn’t over. Temperatures on Wednesday started in the teens and weren’t expected to rise beyond the mid-20s, although the sun started shining in some part of Massachusetts.
Forecasters say more snow – although not a major storm – is expected later in the week.
To the chagrin of parents and delight of schoolchildren, many schools in central and eastern Massachusetts remain closed.
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