Monster nor’easter shuts down travel from Pittsburgh through New York City

Car accidents started ramping up across Pennsylvania as snow accumulated on roads from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.

AccuWeather Global Weather Center – December 17, 2020 –  All of the necessary ingredients to produce a monster nor’easter came together in the Northeast this week, which triggered widespread disruptions, state of emergency declarations and a countless number of wrecks. Millions of people who were in the path of the snowstorm — in big East Coast cities like New York and Philadelphia — prepared then hunkered down in anticipation of what many meteorologists warned was going to be one of the biggest in several years.

The National Weather Service issued winter storm watches and warnings in parts of 13 states spanning from the mountains of North Carolina to the coast of Maine ahead of the storm. Heavy snow continues to spread northeastward into New England while parts of the interior mid-Atlantic see snow continue to pile up.

Precipitation started out as snow in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., at the onset of the storm. The nation’s capital picked up about an inch of snow prior to a switch to rain during the afternoon on Wednesday, washing away all of what had accumulated. Snowfall across the city of Baltimore ranged from 1-2 inches before a change to rain occurred.

AccuWeather Enhanced RealVue Satellite on Wednesday afternoon showing the snowstorm spreading across the Northeast. (AccuWeather)

In New York City, 6.5 inches of snow and sleet had piled up in Central Park as of midnight Thursday, easily surpassing the city’s snowfall total from the entire 2019-20 winter season of 4.8 inches.

Transportation crews were up early on Wednesday morning trying to stay ahead of the storm’s snow and ice. Roads from Virginia to Illinois were facing snowy to icy road conditions by Wednesday morning, prompting the Virginia Department of Transportation to tweet a slew of warnings as crews faced the storm they had been preparing for since at least the beginning of the week.

The Ohio Department of Transportation announced that as of 8:15 a.m. EST Wednesday, nearly 600 crews were out treating and plowing roadways across the state — 300 more than had been mobilized an hour previously.

Farther to the south, James Singleton, a meteorologist at the Redwood, Virginia-based station Cable 12 TV, reported that the state police were already warning of icy bridges on Interstate 81 and that a VDOT radio had described one roadway as a “solid sheet of ice.” Even with the fleet of plow trucks and brine preparations, the snow and ice were too much to handle in some locations.

“The heaviest snowfall totals thus far have been across central and northern Pennsylvania, the southern tier of New York state and into southern Vermont,” AccuWeather Meteorologist Renee Duff said early Thursday morning.

On Wednesday night, snowfall totals surpassed one foot in portions of central and northern Pennsylvania. One band of intense snow has created a phenomenon known as thundersnow, when lightning and thunder are seen during intense bursts of snow.

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