NEW YORK, Nov 28 — Millions of Americans were thankful just to arrive at their Thanksgiving feasts yesterday after a snowstorm dumped up to 51cm of snow on eastern states, causing flight delays and power outages.
Snow flurries drifted over Thomas the Tank Engine, Snoopy and other giant helium balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, where police reported the arrests for disorderly conduct of at least seven protesters who had vowed over social media to throw the event into disarray to show outrage over the racially charged Michael Brown case in Ferguson, Missouri.
The demonstrators were arrested on Sixth Avenue and 37th Street. They had been allowed to cross the parade route but then tried to disrupt the procession, knocking over police barricades and breaking windows, said a spokeswoman for the New York Police Department.
Skies were expected to clear throughout the East Coast, which was slammed overnight by a wet snowstorm that wrought havoc with holiday travellers and cooks.
“Paw Paw, West Virginia — that’s where the jackpot was for snowfall amounts,” said meteorologist Andrew Orrison of the National Weather Service, noting the tiny town was blanketed in 51cm of snow.
Oatmeal-like wet snow piled as high as 38cm in the town of Savoy in the Berkshire Mountains in western Massachusetts and 37.1cm in Warrensburg in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York.
Heavy snow snapped tree limbs that damaged lines, causing hundreds of thousands of power outages from Maine to Virginia, utilities said, and the damage could takes days to repair. Public Service of New Hampshire said 140,000 customers were without power and Central Maine Power Company said yesterday it was working to restore power to 86,213 households.
US flight schedules were upended for a second day during the year’s busiest travel period, with 56 flights cancelled and 403 delayed yesterday, according to FlightAware.com. On Wednesday, more than 700 US flights were cancelled and about 4,400 were delayed, it said.
More than 46 million Americans are expected to make trips between Wednesday and Sunday, travel group AAA said, with more than 89 per cent travelling by car.
Cooks able to fire up their ovens prepared traditional pumpkin pies, stuffings and roasted turkeys, with a small but growing number preparing heritage turkeys linked to the country’s early settlers.
Plumbers from coast to coast, meanwhile, girded for one of their busiest days of the year, when some harried cooks dump the grease from their roasted birds down the drain, inadvertently clogging household pipes and having to call for help.
It is a Thanksgiving tradition that for years has resulted in a 50 per cent increase in calls on the Friday after the holiday to Roto-Rooter, the biggest US plumbing and drain cleaning service, compared with a normal Friday, said company spokesman Paul Abrams. — Reuters
