NYC Digs Out After Decade’s Biggest Blizzard as Schools Reopen and Flights Crawl Back

An unseasonably fierce blizzard has tested New York City’s resilience, exposing both infrastructural strengths and civic fault lines as the metropolis stumbles back to its feet.

For those with long memories, the sight of lower Manhattan swaddled by nearly two feet of snow calls to mind winters of a sterner, less forgiving era. The storm that descended on New York City over President’s Day weekend was, by all accounts, the city’s harshest in a decade—a meteorological thump felt well beyond the five boroughs, disrupting much of the busy Northeast and blanketing Warwick, Rhode Island, in a record three feet (about 91cm).

The immediate consequences for New Yorkers were predictable: thousands of flights cancelled, roads sealed off, power lines felled as snowdrifts overtook streets and sidewalks. On Monday, with emergency vehicles and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s snow-fighting gargantuan—lovingly nicknamed “Darth Vader”—gamely at work, the mayor, Zohran Mamdani, declared the city would nonetheless reopen its public schools on Tuesday. “We dig out fast,” went the spirit, if not always the reality, of civic pronouncements.

For many, this insistence on business as usual rang both familiar and faintly reckless. Not all parents welcomed news of the school reopening, arguing that streets were impassable and snow days, after all, exist for a reason. “Safer for children to have an extra day at home,” opined a Brooklyn father and first responder, expressing a sentiment echoed across neighborhoods from Washington Heights to Jamaica. While 94,500 youngsters in city-funded pre‑K and 3‑K programs braved the elements—some perhaps delighted, others less so—many parents found themselves torn between work obligations and the logistics of snowbound commutes.

The city’s decision, while consistent with its penchant for fortitude, carries immediate implications. For essential workers and those in precarious employment, every day a child is out of school can strain household budgets and patience. Yet, reopening too soon imposes its own costs in the form of slip-and-fall injuries, traffic snarls, and, as some critics charged, a whiff of performative toughness at odds with prudence.

Ripple effects were keenly felt beyond education. At the region’s airports, more than 1,500 delays persisted into Tuesday, per FlightAware. The persistent tangle is not merely a matter of waiting for snowplows: airlines must reposition aircraft and crew—a logistical ballet disrupted by the breadth and ferocity of the storm. Michael McCormick, an associate professor at Embry-Riddle, notes that northeastern hubs, from JFK to Boston Logan, are especially vulnerable to de-icing delays, cascading through networks well after the last flakes have fallen.

The economic aftershocks are diffuse and, for many sectors, unwelcome. Restaurant and gig-economy workers count among the silent casualties when diners stay home and delivery calls dwindle. Small businesses, already squeezed by inflation and waning pandemic supports, face yet another round of lost revenue. For the city’s subway operators and sanitation workers, 12-hour shifts clearing tracks and avenues are a punishing—if time-honored—rite of urban winter.

Yet it is society’s brittle underbelly that storms such as this expose most starkly. Residents in outer-borough public housing complexes, already coping with uneven heating and maintenance, bore the brunt of delays; in some cases, snowed-in seniors went days before relief arrived. The storm’s aftereffects also rekindled debate around the pace and priorities of the city’s recovery effort: is the focus on reopening schools and restoring normality wise, or does it mask deeper infrastructural fragility?

Nationally, New York’s ordeal sits within a larger tableau of American cities battered by capricious weather. Recent years have seen Atlanta humbled by an inch of ice and Dallas crippled by power outages. New York’s perennial resilience is often vaunted, but hazard comparisons with, say, Montreal or Stockholm—where robust snow management is routine, not exceptional—are unflattering. The average New Yorker might reasonably wonder why a city with a $100bn-plus annual budget is still surprised by winter.

Indeed, the relentless march of climate change portends more, not fewer, weather surprises in coming years. The city’s piecemeal adaptation—occasionally ambitious, frequently reactive—contrasts with the systematic investments seen in northern Europe or Tokyo. Investment in hardened power lines, predictive infrastructure, and smarter emergency response will cost billions—considerably less, perhaps, than the aggregate price of annual disruption.

Snowstorms and civic priorities

This blizzard has also thrown the city’s unequal resilience into sharp relief. Wealthier neighborhoods were plowed first; ride-hailing apps surged fares in outer boroughs; lower-income residents hunkered down or braved icy bus stops with limited recourse. City Hall’s decision to re‑open schools quickly nods to the privileged who can work from home, and exposes the vulnerable who must venture out.

There may be a lesson, or at least a salutary reminder, in such weather. Robust cities do not merely dig out quickly—they prepare, adapt, and learn. When future storms gather, New Yorkers will quite reasonably expect more foresight, fewer improvisations, and a response that serves the needs of all communities, not just the better-shod.

In the end, snow will melt, flights will resume, and the resilient will congratulate themselves. But the deeper question is whether, next time nature throws its weight about, the city will be less caught off guard, and better able to balance grit with good judgment. That will require something as rare as a mild February: a willingness to adapt boldly to harsher realities, lest tradition become mere inertia. ■