A dangerous winter storm brought significant snowfall, strong thunderstorms, and blustery winds to the northeastern US on a holiday Monday. The storm system dropped a foot or more of snow in parts of New York state, Ohio, and Pennsylvania Sunday night through Monday morning after pummeling parts of the Southeast on Sunday, the AP reports. "We've had a very strong area of low pressure that’s kind of moved up the coast, with pretty heavy snowfall accumulations from Tennessee, North Carolina all the way into the northeast," says meteorologist Marc Chenard at the weather service’s headquarters in College Park, Maryland.
Forecasters in Buffalo, New York, said almost 18 inches of snow fell by 1pm. Monday. The city advised people not to travel if they didn’t need to on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day, while some surrounding towns instituted a travel ban. “WOW! (Latest) snow measurement at 1 AM was 4.6 inches in the last hour at the Buffalo Airport!” the National Weather Service in Buffalo tweeted overnight. "And tack on another 4 inches in the last hour ending at 2 AM! Total so fa since late Sun evening - 10.2 inches." It later tweeted that as of 1pm, the "snowfall total at the Buffalo Airport was 16.2 inches. This almost doubles the previous record daily snowfall total of 8.3" from 1958."
Power outages affected tens of thousands of customers in the northeast, and hundreds of flights were canceled. New York City got less than an inch of snow, which was washed away by rain overnight. Sleet and rain were the main threats for much of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. NWS meteorologists in Boston said wind gusts could reach 70 mph. The howling winds spread a fire that destroyed a motel and two other structures in coastal Salisbury, Massachusetts, early Monday. The storm brought similar conditions Sunday to the Southeast, where thousands were still without power Monday. Severe thunderstorms in Florida spun up a tornado with 118 mph winds, destroying 30 mobile homes and majorly damaging 51 more.
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