(Bloomberg) — Reopen Broadway, start up the trains again and get the commuters back on the road. The great New York City blizzard of '15 was, alas, a bust.
Not that there was no snow — Manhattan's Central Park had 7.9 inches (20 centimeters) as of 7 a.m. — but the dire forecasts of as much as 36 inches never came to pass. What happened?
It was a fine line, meteorologists said, between this storm being a direct hit on New York and just grazing it. The storm's path was off about 50 to 75 miles and that was all it took. Just 85 miles east of Central Park, over in Mattituck on the north fork of Long Island, they got 24 inches, said David Stark, a National Weather Service meteorologist in Upton, New York.
"That just makes a huge difference, that small distance, especially when you are dealing with a storm like this," Stark said by telephone. "It definitely was a challenge for us."
Since Sunday, the weather service has predicted anywhere from 18 inches to three feet of snow in New York, holding out the possibility that a "historic blizzard" was about to strike the largest city in the U.S.
As the storm approached Monday, commuter rail, buses and subways in New York were halted as of 11 p.m. Amtrak cut back on service along its Northeast Corridor, all trans-Hudson crossings including the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, as well as the George Washington Bridge were shut.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued a travel ban on downstate roads, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy did so as well. At least 7,517 flights were canceled on Monday and Tuesday in the U.S., according to FlightAware, a Houston-based airline tracking service.
In the past 48 hours, 1,776 flights had been canceled at La Guardia Airport alone, as of 9 a.m. New York time, the company said.
"New York was on the knife edge of the dry side," said Richard Bann, a meteorologist with the U.S. Weather Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.
Bann said at the storm's outer edge the line between where the heavy snow fell was sometimes very steep.
"It was a very tight gradient," Bann said. "A knife edge, very sharp. Obviously if you go a short distance east in Connecticut they will tell you a different story."
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