(Bloomberg) — Travelers to New York City are among millions who’ll be caught up on winter storm conditions at the end of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend as a system that started in California evolves into a nor’easter bringing heavy snow, ice and rain.The fast-moving system delayed or grounded thousands of flights in the U.S. Saturday and snarls moved east on Sunday. In South Dakota, nine people were killed Saturday when a small plane crashed shortly after takeoff while the area was under a winter storm warning.“The trans-continental storm system that has hammered the western U.S. and northern Plains with heavy snow and strong winds has now reached the Great Lakes region,” the National Weather Service said in a bulletin on Sunday.“The potential exists for 8 to 16 inches of snow across interior portions of New York and extending eastward to southern Maine, with winter storm warnings in effect.”More than 3,000 flights within, into or out of the U.S. had been delayed on Sunday through 1:50 p.m. Eastern time, with some of the biggest issues encountered at airports in Toronto, Boston and Newark, New Jersey, according to the FlightAware website.New York City will start out with freezing rain, sleet and a little snow before changing over just rain later Sunday, said Marc Chenard, a senior branch forecaster at the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.‘Exercise Caution’“You could face messy conditions on Sunday, so exercise caution and give yourself lots of extra travel time,” NYC Emergency Management Commissioner Deanne Criswell said on Saturday. “For Monday’s commute, I encourage you to use mass transit where possible.”The city’s Department of Sanitation has 705 salt spreaders ready to begin work once two inches of snow has fallen, officials said.New York Governor Andrew Cuomo placed the National Guard on standby as the storm approached. “Snow, black ice, rain and wind are a bad combination,” Cuomo said Sunday he he activated an emergency command center. The state has 524,000 tons of salt to help combat black ice and snowy roads.New York City’s best chances for accumulating snow will probably come Monday, when 1 to 3 inches could fall before the storm finally ends Tuesday. The worst snow in the region will fall north and west of New York, with forecasts of at least 6 inches and closer to a foot near Albany.“It will be slow to move out,” Chenard said by telephone early Sunday. “It will be less intense through the day Monday but may not come to a complete end until Tuesday.”Winter weather advisories were expanded Sunday morning to include much of northeast New Jersey, southern Westchester County in New York, and much of southern Connecticut. Coastal flood advisories and gale warnings were also issued.Washington probably won’t have any snow and Philadelphia will be mainly rain.“The most uncertainty in the big cities is probably Boston,” which could get 3 to 6 inches, Chenard said. Boston is under a winter storm warning through Tuesday morning.North-central Massachusetts could have as much as 16 inches of snow and ice from Sunday through Tuesday, rendering travel “very difficult to impossible,” the NWS’s Boston bureau said.Heavy snow was expected from the eastern Dakotas to northern Michigan on Sunday, with potential snowfall accumulations on the order of 6 to 12 inches, the NWS said.Another slow-moving system is gathering over the eastern Pacific and targeting the West Coast. Periods of rain and heavy snow across the Sierra Nevada can be expected through the remainder of the weekend, adding to the heavy precipitation at the end of last week, the NWS said.Some 55 million travelers were expected to make trips of 50 miles (80 kilometers) or more this Thanksgiving, according to AAA, a federation of motor clubs. That’s the second-highest volume for the holiday since 2005.The vast majority of holiday travelers drive to their destinations, and were helped this year by lower gas prices. But flights are also packed — AAA said about 4.5 million Americans were expected to fly during the Thanksgiving holiday this year.The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating Saturday’s deadly crash of a Pilatus PC-12 single-engine plane near Chamberlain, South Dakota, the agency said on Twitter. There were three survivors among the dozen people on board. (Updates with flight delays, Cuomo comment from fifth paragraph.)\–With assistance from Steve Geimann.To contact the reporters on this story: Ros Krasny in Washington at [email protected];Brian K. Sullivan in Boston at [email protected] contact the editors responsible for this story: James Ludden at [email protected], Steve GeimannFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com©2019 Bloomberg L.P.
