Northeast buried

BOSTON — A howling blizzard yesterday slammed the Northeast, particularly New England, with more than 2 feet of snow and hurricane-strength wind gusts, halting air travel for thousands of people, keeping others off slippery highways and burying parked cars.

Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Rhode Island Gov. Donald L. Carcieri both declared states of emergency.

Up to 29 inches of snow fell north of Boston, parts of New Hampshire got 2 feet, New York’s Catskills collected at least 20 inches, and 18 inches fell on parts of Connecticut, New Jersey, Rhode Island and the eastern tip of New York’s Long Island.

The weather system had earlier piled a foot of snow across parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana and northern Ohio. The D.C. area escaped the brunt of the storm but still received from 2 to 7 inches of snow with bitter temperatures and wind chills.

At least six deaths were linked to the weather: three in Ohio, two in Wisconsin and one in Pennsylvania.

Winds gusted to 84 mph on Nantucket and the entire island off the southeastern coast of Massachusetts, and its 9,400 winter customers were plunged into darkness yesterday. On the Massachusetts mainland, some 16,000 customers lost power, the utility InStar said. Smaller outages were reported elsewhere around the Northeast.

Because the wind blowing off the ocean coincided with a full moon and high tide, coastal communities were warned of flooding.

“There’s a lot of self-evacuations going on. People simply got out of Dodge,” Peter Judge, spokesman for the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency, said yesterday morning. National Guard troops helped evacuate part of Scituate, 20 miles south of Boston, but morning high tide receded without significant flooding, he said.

As state and city officials urged residents to stay off the roads, many people tried to take the storm in stride.

Bill Bush, 32, waded through drifts across the deserted Boston Common to pick up some things at his office for a trip today, then headed home for yesterday’s American Football Conference Championship game between the New England Patriots and the Pittsburgh Steelers.

“I figured it’s early, and it’s nice to get out to see the snow before everyone dirtied it up,” he said. “There’s nowhere to go, so I’ll just grab some friends to come over to watch the game.”

For others, towering snowdrifts and whiteout conditions wiped out travel plans.

Boston’s Logan International Airport closed early yesterday because snowplow crews couldn’t keep up with the blinding snow.

“It’s more likely we’ll open tomorrow morning,” said Phil Orlandella, a spokesman for the airport that normally has 900 flights on a Sunday.

Logan’s shutdown meant Shawn Simmons, 28, of Nashua, N.H., was stuck at Washington Dulles International Airport on his return from a vacation in South America.

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