A historic winter storm has buried New York City and crippled much of the northeast with travel bans and power outages.
The powerful bomb cyclone, with near-hurricane-force wind gusts and heavy snow, proved to be fiercer than forecasters had initially predicted—toppling trees onto parked cars, cutting off power for nearly 400,000 people, and dumping over a foot of snow by Monday morning even as it continues to gain strength.
Millions of people have been affected by storm Hernando, which has led to the cancellation of thousands of flights in and out of NYC-area airports and forced local authorities to declare states of emergency.
At the time of writing, close to 400,000 people are reported to have been affected by power outages, with around 70 million people affected nationally. New Jersey has been hit hardest by outages, with some 103,000 people without power at the time of writing. According to PowerOutage, at least 68,000 have also been cut off in Delaware, 33,000 in Maryland, and 22,000 in Virginia.
FlightAware noted that JFK, LaGuardia, Newark Liberty, Boston Logan, and Philadelphia International had more than 3,500 flights canceled between them.
“New York City has not faced a storm of this scale in the last decade,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani warned.
He urged New Yorkers to stay inside, while New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill issued a travel ban that took effect at 7 a.m. Monday.
Phones across the Big Apple blared with a warning late Sunday with an emergency alert announcing, “ALL NON-ESSENTIAL VEHICLES are RESTRICTED from NYC roads until 12 p.m. 2/23.” It added that “vehicles are only permitted for essential and emergency travel.”
In a post on X that night, NYC Sanitation said, “Snow is blanketing the city, though falling at different rates in different areas! Salt spreaders are out citywide. They will be making their rounds all night.
“We are ALREADY seeing 2 inches of snow in some places; plows are out in those areas.”
While the snow was still falling early Monday, firefighters in Brooklyn responded to at least two cases of downed trees that had landed on top of vehicles.
Mamdani’s travel ban is expected to remain in place until at least noon on Monday, but the city’s children can expect to get the whole day off from school.
“No remote learning, no logging on,” Mamdani wrote on X. “Our first real snow day in seven years. This blizzard is serious. Stay inside. Travel ban 9pm–noon tomorrow so crews can keep streets clear.”
NJ Transit has shut down various buses and railways, while the New York Subway is operating on a modified schedule.
“A mandatory travel restriction will go into effect in New Jersey at 9:00 PM tonight and lift at 7:00 AM on Monday, February 23,” Sherrill wrote on X.
“This is a very serious storm and I urge all residents to stay inside and stay safe.”
DoorDash cancelled operations in the hours leading up to Mamdani’s announcement, according to the New York Post.
Hernando comes just a week after Storm Fern, a historic and expansive freeze that covered vast swathes of the nation.
Hernando is a different beast entirely, forecasters have said, with wetter snow making it more challenging to manage.
AccuWeather Meteorologist Dan DePodwin told the Post, “This snow is pretty heavy. Thinking back to January, that was about 1 foot of snow in New York City, and more farther north. That was a very light powdery snow, so it wasn’t that heavy to shovel.”
Weather Service meteorologist James Connolly told The New York Times that the office expects “periods of blizzard conditions” as the storm worsens.
In order to declare it such, he said, “We’d like to see it sustained for a couple of hours.”
‘We’re essentially getting there,” he later added.
Lawmakers have been told not to return to Capitol Hill until at least Tuesday, with votes canceled until then.
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