PROVIDENCE, R.I. — New Englanders began the back-breaking job of digging out from as much as 3 feet of snow Saturday and emergency crews used snowmobiles to reach shivering motorists stranded overnight on New York’s Long Island after a howling storm swept through the Northeast.
About 510,000 homes and businesses remained without power late Saturday night, down from a total of about 650,000, and some may be cold and dark for days. Roads across the New York-to-Boston corridor of roughly 25 million people were impassable. Cars were entombed by drifts. Some people found the wet, heavy snow packed so high against their homes they couldn’t get their doors open.
“It’s like lifting cement. They say it’s 2 feet, but I think it’s more like 3 feet,” said Michael Levesque, who was shoveling snow in Quincy, Mass., for a landscaping company.
In Providence, where drifts were 5 feet high and telephone lines drooped under the weight of ice and snow, Jason Harrison labored nearly three hours to clear his driveway and front walk and still had more to do. His snowblower, he said, “has already paid for itself.”