For the second time in less than a week, a storm rolled into the Northeast with wet, heavy snow Wednesday, grounding flights, closing schools and bringing another round of power outages to a corner of the country still recovering from the previous blast of winter.
The nor'easter knocked out electricity to tens of thousands of customers and produced "thundersnow" as it made its way up the coast, with flashes of lightning and booming thunder from the Philadelphia area to New York City. A New Jersey middle school teacher was struck by lightning but survived.
Officials warned of a hazardous evening commute and urged people to stay off the roads.
"It's kind of awful," said New York University student Alessa Raiford, who put two layers of clothing on a pug named Jengo before taking him for a walk in slushy, sloppy Manhattan, where rain gave way to wet snow in the afternoon. "I'd rather that it be full-on snowing than rain and slush. It just makes it difficult."
The National Weather Service issued a winter storm warning into Thursday morning from the Philadelphia area through most of New England. Forecasters said Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the New York City area could get a foot or more of snow, and Massachusetts 1½ feet.
More than 2,600 flights across the region -- about 1,900 in the New York metro area alone -- were canceled.
- 5:45 p.m.: Gov. Malloy will brief reporters about the state's response to the winter storm. You can watch the livestream by clicking play in the video player above -- or by clicking this link.The press conference is expected to begin around 6 p.m at the Emergency Operations Center in Hartford, Connecticut.
Boston neighborhood still flooded even before 2nd storm hits
5:15 p.m.: Joesph Soares was not going to let a little water stop his kids from getting to school.His neighborhood, right on the Duxbury-Marshfield line in Massachusetts, has been flooded since Friday when the first nor'easter hit. By Wednesday, he was getting creative.Soares used a paddle board to bring his three kids to the bus stop, CBS Boston reports."I've been bringing them one at a time," said Soares.- "My wife is a nurse a pediatric nurse and she has to get to work, I've been bringing her on the paddle board also."Breaches in the seawall along towns on the South Shore have left numerous neighborhoods in similar positions, even before Wednesday's snowstorm."We have massive, massive destruction to our infrastructure here, this is a huge problem for the town," said Duxbury Town Manager René Read.On Tuesday, crews were using heavy machinery to haul boulders to the beach where the seawall had collapsed as a temporary solution.Duxbury resident Susan Nicols said she is devastated. "Never thought this would happen because we're so much higher than everyone else, but because of the wall we had no control," she explained.Soares said, "There's a real fear of people absolutely losing their house especially up on Cable Hill ... our prayers are with them."Eventually, the entire seawall will need to be replaced. The town hopes to have flood waters pumped out of the area by Friday.
