No let up in the snow for travellers on America’s east coast

Day two of the winter white-out on USA’s eastern seaboard. The winds that had driven the blizzards had abated, the sun broke through but the planes at Newark’s international airport remained on the snow covered ground and so too did thousands of travellers.

There was no way out, north, south, east or west-as international passengers were stranded.

On the streets of New York where up to sixty centimetres of snow had fallen subway passengers were trapped in unheated carriages, buses were stranded while Shafqat Hayatin a taxi driver had to spend the night in his cab after the snowfall stopped his car in its tracks.

“I was crossing with my passenger, the street was so bad I got stuck in here. I checked with the tow trucks, nobody can pass by, I asked the police, nobody helped, so I had to sleep in my car but I couldn’t get out,” he explained.

More than 2,400 workers were working 12 hour shifts to clear the city’s 10,000 kilometres of streets, though some believed the weather was normal and it was just the media which was exaggerating the severity of it.

“The media always overdoes it, you know, as far as I am concerned this is normal winter weather,” remarked Paul Luongo from Boston.

And while the weather meant holiday fun for many of the city’s schoolchildren, the storm moved on and across the border to pummel eastern Canada.

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