MILFORD, Conn. | Roofs caved in as a massive snowstorm enveloping much of the nation swept into the Northeast on Wednesday, bringing buildings to the breaking point in a winter that has already delivered more snow than many cities typically see in a whole season. No one has been seriously injured.
There were several reports of structural collapses throughout the region, including a gas station canopy on New York’s Long Island and an airplane hangar near Boston. In at least two places, workers’ sense of hearing allowed them to narrowly escape.
The entire third floor of a building in Middletown, Conn., collapsed, littering the street with bricks and snapping two trees. Acting Fire Marshal Al Santostefano said two workers fled when they heard a cracking sound.
“It’s like a bomb scene,” the fire marshal said. “Thank God they left the building when they did.”
Officials in Enfield, Conn., responded to a second major roof collapse in two days Wednesday, when the top of an auto repair and towing business caved in. On Tuesday, an 80-by-40-foot section of roof at a warehouse building collapsed.
“We’ve been extremely fortunate in these two incidents that no one’s been trapped or killed,” said Ed Richards, an Enfield fire chief. “I’m urging folks to get their roofs cleaned off as much as they can.”
Homeowners heeded that and similar calls by shoveling thick layers from their roofs.
In southeastern Massachusetts, Ken Ritchie drove 45 minutes to his mother’s house in Whitman to shovel about a foot of wet, heavy snow off her roof. Mr. Ritchie shoveled the roof as a cold, steady rain fell, while his mother, Kathie Ritchie, dug out her car and shoveled the driveway.
“I almost started crying when he came to my door this morning to clear off the roof,” she said. “He’s a wonderful young man.”
Part of a hangar collapsed at Norwood Memorial Airport near Boston, damaging a helicopter and six planes. In Easton, Mass., Triton Technologies employees heard cracking and metal bending and escaped before their building collapsed.
The same storm stranded hundreds of motorists and shuttered airports and schools across the Midwest.
By midday, Chicago had recorded 20.2 inches of snow, the city’s third-largest amount on record. A foot or more was dumped on parts of Missouri, Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma.
The storm was, if not unprecedented, extraordinarily rare, National Weather Service meteorologist Thomas Spriggs said. “A storm that produces a swath of 20-inch snow is really something we’d see once every 50 years — maybe,” he said.
The system was blamed for at least 10 deaths, including a homeless man who burned to death on Long Island as he tried to light cans of cooking fuel and a woman in Oklahoma City who was killed while being pulled behind a truck on a sled that hit a guard rail.
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