As a blizzard battered many parts of the Northeast, the snowfall hit Drew University’s campus, cancelling classes for Monday, Feb. 23. While roughly a foot and a half of snow covered campus in a pristine coat, students stayed in their dorms, attending classes over Zoom. After classes, students used makeshift sleds outside of the library and constructed snowmen in various locations.
The snowfall varied greatly across the Northeast, with parts of New England, such as Providence, R.I., getting a record three feet of snow, to a state high of 31 inches in Lyndhurst, N.J., to closer to a foot in other parts of the state according to nytimes.com. In the New York area, many forms of public transportation, like NJTransit or AMTRAK, were shut down for at least a day, with delays continuing later into the week, also found on nytimes.com.
Transit delays, whether it be poor road conditions or issues with public transportation, led to some classes on the Tuesday afterwards getting cancelled or moved online, as there was difficulty for certain professors or for commuters to get to campus, though classes were not moved to Zoom nor cancelled across the board at Drew.
In New Jersey, there were 130,000 reported power outages, and 35,000 still without electricity the morning after the storm, said nj.com/weather. While the storm may have been particularly strong in terms of wind, snow and power outages, state climatologist David Robinson maintained that it was “certainly not in the top 10 for New Jersey’s biggest snowstorms on record.” Prior snowstorms, such as the large ones in 2021, 2016 and 1996 resulted in even greater snowfall and significant impact on the electrical grid, stated nj.com/weather.
Across the rest of the Northeast, city and state officials hurried to manage and mitigate the impacts of the wintery storm. Pay for emergency shovelers was raised to $30 an hour, from $19, to help clear the sidewalks across New York City, and use of the roads was restricted to “essential vehicles.” Across Massachusetts, close to 300,000 power outages occurred, while roads were undrivable in many parts of the state. This left municipal and state authorities dealing with the results of a snowstorm, about which Governor Maura Healey said was “as bad as I’ve seen,” found on nytimes.com.
At Drew University, there was an efficient response to the snowstorm. With plowing and laying down salt on the paths, the campus was traversable with relative ease in time for students to make it to Commons for meals. All main paths on campus were cleared for students to get to and from class when Drew reopened that Tuesday.
Nathan Moldover is a first year double majoring in political science and philosophy and minoring in law, justice and society.
