BOSTON — Stoic New Englanders doggedly went about their business Friday as a winter storm that could drop close to a foot of snow in some areas gave them their first real taste of winter.
They didn’t have to like it, but after some parts of New England got more than nine feet of snow last winter, they could deal with it.
“It’s beautiful,” said Raul Rodriguez, who works in the Connecticut attorney general’s office. “It’s been mild this winter. We deserve it. We’ve had several brutal years of snowstorms.”
The storm was New England’s biggest snowstorm so far this season, coming two weeks after a massive blizzard engulfed much of the Eastern Seaboard but largely spared Boston and points north.
And not everyone was chipper about the new-fallen snow.
“I hate snow,” said Bruce Schulman, a Boston University history professor who was waiting at Boston’s South Station to take a train to New York.
“Obviously, we’ve had a pretty mild winter so far, but we needed it after last year,” Schulman said. “If I never see snow again, I won’t miss it.”
The snow didn’t stop presidential candidates from campaigning in New Hampshire, just four days away from its first-in-the-nation primary.
Republican candidate John Kasich approached a 6-year-old girl at an event in Atkinson and asked her, “Don’t you want to be out in the snow?” and then told her father, “Dad, why don’t you take her out in the snow?”
The National Weather Service issued a winter weather advisory from Delaware to New Jersey and a winter storm warning for most of New England.
The wet, heavy snow knocked out power to tens of thousands of homes and businesses. Utility Eversource reported more than 50,000 outages in Connecticut alone, and 19,000 in Massachusetts.
Many school districts across the region closed for the day. Every public school in Rhode Island was closed except for the lone school on Block Island, which was expected to get much less snow than the mainland.
Travel was treacherous; police across the region reported dozens of spinouts.
The storm was expected to leave 6 to 8 inches of snow in the Boston area, 6 to 10 in the Worcester area and 4 to 8 inches in Providence, Rhode Island, according to the National Weather Service.
Maine could get more. Meteorologist Mal Walker in Caribou said Maine’s eastern tip could see up to 11 inches.
Farther south, the National Weather Service said New York’s Long Island could see 5 inches or more. Parts of New Jersey got about 4 inches before the snow tapered off, while rain that turned to snow snarled the morning commute in eastern Pennsylvania and caused some schools to delay opening.
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Associated Press writers Denise Lavoie in Boston; Dave Collins in Hartford, Connecticut; Holly Ramer in Atkinson, New Hampshire; and David Sharp in Portland, Maine; contributed to this report.
