Fierce Snowstorm Still Stalling Freight in New England; N.Y., N.J. Open Roads
“A lot of the shippers and receivers are closed up here, and a lot of the states have shut down some of the highways, so drivers are hunkered down at truck stops right now,” said Jesse Murphy, a customer service representative at Pottle’s Transportation in Hermon, Maine, outside Bangor.
Ninety percent of the 100 trucks that call the Hermon terminal home are waiting out the storm in other states, Murphy said.
“Some of the drivers haven’t left out of [Pennsylvania] yet since Connecticut and Massachusetts were shut down,” Murphy said. “If they’re delivering up this way, then there’s no sense them leaving and just getting a few hundred miles down the road and having to shut back down again.”
Murphy said shippers and receivers in the state are closed and that a skeleton crew at Pottle’s was closing the terminal early the afternoon of Jan. 27 before roads became impassable. Forecasters were saying snowfall in Maine could reach 30 inches in some parts of the state.
“Usually I can see the interstate out the window here, but of course it’s snowing so hard I can’t see,” Murphy said of Interstate 95.
Maine Gov. Paul LePage declared a state of emergency but left the interstate open at a reduced speed of 45 miles per hour.
In neighboring Massachusetts, however, Gov. Charlie Baker closed all roads on Jan. 26 but lifted the travel ban at midday on Jan. 27 for the western side of the state in the counties of Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire and Berkshire.
The ban remained in effect, though, for all of the Massachusetts Turnpike.
At 2 p.m. on Jan. 27, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy lifted the statewide travel ban, although he urged nonessential traffic to stay off the road.
Meanwhile in New York and New Jersey, roads were being cleared and reopened and carriers were digging out.
“We’re just in here clearing out our terminals and getting our trucks loaded to go out tomorrow,” said Tom Connery, president of New England Motor Freight in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
“We have about half of the system shut down right now,” Connery said.
“Our two terminals in North Jersey are shut down as well as our New England terminals, but everything else is open which includes Upstate New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia and Chicago.”
The storm was not as bad as originally forecast for the New York-New Jersey metro area.
Upstate New York was equally as relieved as the storm veered eastward, saving the region from the kind of gigantic storm that in November dumped nearly 7 feet of snow on the New York State Thruway, paralyzing the Buffalo region.
This latest storm was originally forecast to drop 14 inches of snow in the Albany area but left only about 3 to 4 inches, said Kendra Hems, president of the New York State Motor Truck Association.
“Everything in New York is open now,” Hems said. “All the bans have been lifted.”
State officials closed the Thruway the evening of Jan. 26 between Albany and New York City.
“For this storm, for the first time, the state really worked to find staging areas for the trucks, and so when they did shut down the Thruway to trucks last night,” Hems said, “they created four staging areas in the Albany area so that when trucks got off they had somewhere to go.”
