A holiday storm system played havoc Wednesday with the Thanksgiving travel plans of tens of millions of people wiping out hundreds of flights in the Northeast, dumping rain on busy roads and threatening more than a foot of snow in some places.
Rain fell on drivers getting an early start from the big cities Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington into the Carolinas. By midday, snow was falling in every state from Virginia to Maine.
"If this was any other day of the year, it would be a pretty big storm but nothing too out of the ordinary," said Kevin Roth, a meteorologist at The Weather Channel. "But it's come at one of the worst possible times, the day before Thanksgiving. It's going to be very, very tricky for anyone planning to travel today."
By the end of the day, parts of West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey were expected to get 3 to 6 inches of snow, and interior New England as much as a foot and a half.
Flight cancellations began piling up at major airports. By afternoon, Newark Liberty airport in New Jersey, LaGuardia in New York and Philadelphia International each had more than 150 flights scrapped. Arriving planes at those airports were delayed as much as three hours.
Amtrak said it was in good shape: "The system is working, just busy," said Kimberly Woods, a spokeswoman.
The Defense Department said it would open unused military airspace for commercial flights through Sunday. The airspace, mainly on the East Coast and throughout the Gulf of Mexico and the Southwest, will make available "more highways in the sky that we can move planes through to get people to their destination efficiently," said Michael Huerta, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration.
Roth said the cut-off line between heavy and light snow was likely to be very abrupt. "Someone could go from an inch in the southeast of a city and drive 10 miles northwest and find themselves in more than 10 inches," he said.
The National Weather Service issued winter storm warnings many upped from winter weather advisories across a large icicle-shaped area from the Canada Border to North Carolina. The snow was likely to wind up in most places by Wednesday night but would linger in Boston until early Thursday, according to Roth.
First published November 26 2014, 3:03 AM
Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/noreaster-threatens-thanksgiving-travel-chaos-east-coast-n256426
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