NEW YORK — Neighbors, government workers and a powerful railroad snow-clearing machine nicknamed “Darth Vader” scrambled Tuesday to dig out much of the northeastern United States, paralyzed from a record-breaking storm that led to thousands of canceled flights.
But as the snow moved northward and tapered off in other areas, forecasters warned that another storm could be right around the corner.
“As I’ve been saying, if you’ve seen one storm, you’ve seen one storm. This storm was not normal,” New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill told reporters on Tuesday. “I want to emphasize we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Monday’s storm, which meteorologists are calling the strongest in a decade, dumped more than 2 feet of snow in parts of the Northeast.
Two people have died, and one is critically injured, after a tree fell on a Maryland road during the storm.
Meanwhile, the body of a man was found buried under snow in Deer Park, New York, on Monday. Suffolk County police said they couldn’t immediately connect the discovery to this storm.
By Tuesday, roads were beginning to reopen, mass transportation was returning to service in some cities, and power had been restored to some of the hundreds of thousands who had lost electricity in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware, and Rhode Island.
There were 365,000 power outages reported in the Garden State during this storm, and just 35,000 customers were still in the dark by late Tuesday morning, Sherrill said.
Travel bans in Rhode Island and Massachusetts were lifted at noon ET, but officials still urged residents in this hard-hit state to stay home if possible so heavy machinery could have space to clear snow.
“This is not a quick cleanup. Recovery will take time, patience, and coordination,” said Rhode Island Emergency Management Agency Director Marc Pappas. “Snow removal at this scale is a massive, massive operation.”
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