Blizzard strands Long Island drivers

Payloaders clear snow from the Long Island Expressway just west of exit 59 Ocean Ave where several cars and a truck are abandoned after a snow storm on Saturday, Feb. 9, 31, 2013, in Ronkonkoma , N.Y. (AP Photo/Kathy Kmonicek)

Payloaders clear snow from the Long Island Expressway just west of exit 59 Ocean Ave where several cars and a truck are abandoned after a snow storm on Saturday, Feb. 9, 31, 2013, in Ronkonkoma , N.Y. (AP Photo/Kathy Kmonicek)

Sunday, February 10, 2013

— Lorna Jones decided to brave the blizzard Friday, venturing onto the Long Island Expressway as the snow began piling up. So did many others here in Suffolk County.

They all came to regret it.

The snow and wind lashed their cars until finally they could drive no farther. And so Jones and others huddled in their cars all night on the expressway and its exit ramps, scanning the horizon through ice-caked windows in hopes that plows would reach them.

“It’s terrible. It’s cold. I don’t know how long I’m going to be here,” said Jones, 62, a nurse who stalled near the town of Brookhaven, less than a mile from her destination. “Are there any plans to help us?”

She said she had slept fitfully in her car, with no food or water, and only a bottle of Listerine next to her on the passenger seat.

Though the storm wrought relatively little havoc in most of New York City, Long Island suffered a different fate. Some areas received more than 2 feet of snow.

By Saturday, cars were littered across the Long Island Expressway, some abandoned on the side of the road, their owners out of sight. Others were wedged on exit ramps, crossing traffic lanes and hindering efforts to plow.

“It was like a chain reaction,” said Mike Huebner, 39, a snowplow driver from Shoreham, N.Y. “We’d have to help people or we couldn’t get through, and then we’d get stuck.”

Officials estimated that hundreds of drivers had been stranded or had abandoned their cars. The National Guard was mobilized on snowmobiles.

On Saturday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo went to Suffolk County to oversee the rescue effort on the Long Island Expressway and other major roadways. His aides said the state had deployed 300 snowplows to Long Island, and that more were on their way from other parts of the state.

Cuomo said no one had died on Long Island because of the storm.

Cuomo defended the decision to allow the Long Island Expressway and other major thorough fares to remain open. In Massachusetts, the authorities banned cars from the roads before the storm.

“We wanted to give people an opportunity to get home,” Cuomo said. “We didn’t want to strand people at work.”

Gov. Dannel Malloy of Connecticut reported that local authorities were grappling with similar challenges.

“One of the biggest problems we are facing is stalled automobiles,” Malloy said. “We are trying to dig them out and tow them away.”

He said there were several cases of people in cars who needed to be treated for hypothermia.

On Long Island, the clogged roadways were complicating efforts to restore electricity, with repair crews unable to reach disabled power lines.

The authorities on Long Island said they had prepared for the storm, but they said they were still startled by the scene on Saturday on the major thoroughfares. Standing among unmoving sedans, pickups and UPS trucks Saturday morning, Steve Bellone, the county executive for Suffolk County, pressed a cell phone to his ear, straining to hear a report about the National Guard’s efforts to extract drivers.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Bellone said. “Snow came so hard and fast; it just swallowed people up.”

There were also reports of altruism. Scott Cross, 33, briefly left his utility vehicle, stopped since the early morning, to help a fellow driver dislodge his Toyota sedan from the snow. The triumph was fleeting. The Toyota rolled forward about 40 feet before becoming stuck again.

Cross, who went to Long Island from Charleston, S.C., to help repair damage from super storm Sandy, marveled at the region’s recent weather.

“It’s one natural disaster after another,” he said, resting beside his vehicle.

Information for this article was contributed by Matt Flegenheimer of The New York Times.

Front Section, Pages 12 on 02/10/2013