Less than a week after a winter storm dumped several feet of snow on Boston and New England, a new storm system is creeping in from the west bringing even more snow and ice to the north-east.
Storm warnings are in place from Pittsburgh to Boston as the storm – dubbed Linus by some forecasters – moves eastward. A band of freezing rain is expected to move north during the day on Monday from New York City through southern New England, while Maine and other northern states could receive as much as 18 inches of snow, according to the Weather Channel.
The snow is moving east from the midwest, where it has already snowed more than a foot in Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio and Michigan. Chicago received almost 18 inches of snow on Sunday, its sixth-largest snowfall since records began.
Tom Niziol, a winter weather expert with the Weather Channel, told the Guardian that Linus was “certainly … the largest winter storm of the season”, having started producing winter weather conditions over the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico.
He also said that freezing rain was the most dangerous weather for travelling.
Boston mayor Marty Walsh declared a state of emergency on Sunday as Massachusetts – which is still recovering from a storm that saw some areas get more than 30 inches of snow – was forecast to get as much as 16 more inches.
The snowstorm is delaying two of the nation’s biggest court cases — the murder trial of former New England Patriots star Aaron Hernandez and jury selection in the federal death penalty trial of Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. Proceedings were expected to resume Tuesday.
Across the country, hundreds of public schools canceled classes due to the danger of children traveling. Many parochial schools and colleges did the same.
The weather led to power outages, including roughly 10,000 ComEd customers in Illinois on Sunday evening. That number had been cut to 5,500 by midnight CST and was down to 2,500 statewide early Monday.
The frigid weather made life difficult for commuters. In New York on Monday morning, the 7 train experienced severe delays, trapping commuters on crowded trains for hours at a time. The cause was partly because the third rail froze over at Queensboro Plaza, and partly because an umbrella blew (or otherwise found it’s way) onto the third rail at 52nd Street and caught fire.
In New Jersey, the Westfield Patch reported that more than 100 accidents have were caused by the snow on roads in the state, and many roads have been slowed to a crawl.
More than 4,000 flights have been cancelled because of the extreme weather, many of them from Chicago’s O’Hare and Boston’s Logan airports.
Public schools are closed on Monday in Chicago, parts of southern Wisconsin and Michigan, Rhode Island and Connecticut, upstate New York and Massachusetts, including Boston, among other places.
Overnight temperatures are expected to plummet as well, with Albany, New York, expecting a low of 4F (-16C). Meteorologists there have warned that a “flash freeze” could happen overnight.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
