NEW YORK - At least 1,500 US flights were cancelled Friday as a winter storm producing blizzard-like conditions swept over the US Northeast, dropping 6 inches to 2 feet of snow across the region and shut down schools, government offices as well as major highways in New York and Pennsylvania.
The airports most affected by the storm as of Friday morning were New York’s John F. Kennedy international airport, New Jersey’s Newark Liberty International, New York’s La Guardia Airport, Philadelphia International Airport and Boston’s Logan International Airport.
The snowstorm, the first in 2014, also prompted the United Nations to close its headquarters complex on Friday, according a UN announcement. All scheduled meetings were cancelled.
The governors of the northeastern New York and New Jersey have declared states of emergency. Arctic temperatures and high winds were forecast for much of the area, including wind gusts of nearly 80 kilometers. New York Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency and ordered several major highways in the central Hudson Valley shut down.
Temperatures across a wide swath of the northeast plummeted below zero, Burlington, Vermont braced for temperatures of minus 25 C, as did Montreal, Quebec to the north in Canada.
Meanwhile, the upper Midwest remained in a deep freeze, with temperatures as low as minus 41 degrees Celsius settling over the Dakotas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, northern Illinois, Iowa and Michigan. More than 100 million people in 22 states were in the path of the storm that also battered the Midwest.