As the snow began to lift in parts of the Northeast on Tuesday, millions of residents resumed the work of getting back to school, work and daily travel after a storm that knocked out transit, canceled flights and left at least one person dead. The National Weather Service said the storm was a “classic bomb cyclone/nor’easter off the Northeast coast,” and it warned that another system developing over the Great Lakes could bring additional snow and keep conditions unstable as it heads into the region.
Across the area, officials and families weighed safety and logistics as they navigated treks to school and work over snowbanks and slick, salted roads. Many large school districts remained closed, including in Boston and Hartford, Connecticut, as the cleanup continued into Tuesday.
New York City was the exception that drew attention because Mayor Zohran Mamdani declared that more than 900,000 students in the city’s public school system would have a regular day. In remarks about the decision, Mamdani invited children to pelt him with snowballs, and some students and caregivers appeared to embrace the idea as they made morning drop-offs through piled snow and avoided salt spreaders.
Attendance and staffing reflected the strain on the system. Kamar Samuels, the schools chancellor, said preliminary attendance data showed 63% of the roughly 900,000 students attended Tuesday, compared with about 90% average attendance during the last school year. Samuels also said nearly 1 in 6 teachers called out sick, leading officials to bring in more than 5,000 substitutes, and both he and Mamdani said families rely on in-person schooling and that it would have been complicated to roll out remote learning right after a midwinter break.
While school decisions varied, the storm’s physical impact was widespread. Meteorologists said the system was the strongest in a decade, dropping more than 2 feet (0.6 meters) of snow in parts of the Northeast and more than 3 feet (0.9 meters) in Rhode Island, exceeding totals from the 1978 Blizzard in that region. In Newport, Rhode Island police said Joseph Boutros, 21, was found unconscious inside a vehicle covered in snow on Monday night and was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead due to carbon monoxide poisoning.
Officials reported that recovery efforts were under way even as the weather picture shifted. By Tuesday morning, roads began reopening and mass transportation returned in some cities, and power had returned for some of the hundreds of thousands who lost electricity in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Delaware and Rhode Island. Douglas Foley, president of electric operations for utility Eversource, said more than 100,000 people remained without power on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which he described as operating essentially on a single circuit.
Transit disruption did not fully disappear. Amtrak canceled some trains between Boston and New York and between New York and Philadelphia on Tuesday morning. Other rail services continued, including New Jersey Transit, and the Long Island Railroad used a snow-clearing train car known as “Darth Vader” to remove snow drifts, according to the report.
A major driver of travel disruption was air travel. FlightAware reported that about 2,200 flights in and out of the United States were canceled Tuesday, with most cancellations tied to airports in New York, New Jersey and Boston. Rhode Island’s T.F. Green International Airport halted all flights Monday as it dealt with nearly 38 inches (97 centimeters) of snow, the weather service said.
As cleanup proceeded, the weather service said it was monitoring another storm expected to move from the Great Lakes toward the Northeast, potentially bringing snow to the region before a transition that includes rain. The storm was not expected to be as strong, but Frank Pereira, a meteorologist for the weather service in College Park, Maryland, said that even a few extra inches could make cleanup more difficult in hard-hit areas.
The impacts of the storm also reached beyond weather and transportation into civic and court schedules. In Manhattan federal court, the storm-related travel disruption contributed to delays in a sex trafficking case involving wealthy brothers Alon, Oren and Tal Alexander, after a juror was “trapped in Miami” and not scheduled to return until Friday. Judge Valerie Caproni dismissed the stranded juror Tuesday, and the trial was not held last week to accommodate jurors whose children were on a school break.
The report also described city planning for snow removal. In New York City, officials said sanitation workers would deploy snow melters—large basins of warm water—after helping melt 23 million pounds (11.5 metric tons) of snow during last month’s storm. In Providence, Rhode Island, officials said snow was being taken to five locations and that additional dumping grounds could be added if needed.
The storm’s disruptions came amid ongoing efforts to manage risk and prepare for what comes next. Even as the Northeast dug out, the weather service’s warning of another incoming system added pressure to recovery work and travel planning—especially for areas still dealing with heavy snow and outages.