The northeastern US shivered amid heavy snowfall and far below average temperatures today in a storm that grounded thousands of flights and triggered traffic chaos.
The nasty weather with its bone-chilling gusts and heavy snow stretched from Washington to New England. The Midwest was hit hard, too.
Taking into account the wind chill factor, the temperature in Chicago plummeted to minus 28 Celsius, the Chicago Tribune said.
In the nation's largest city, the evening commute to home in New York yesterday was a mess and the city was expected to get as many as 14 inches of snow by today morning.
"It's horrible. Snow is cute for only a little bit," Mary Catherine Hughes, standing by a subway stop with an umbrella rendered useless in fierce wind, told The New York Times.
The city's new mayor Bill de Blasio urged people to stay home say road crews could clear streets.
Downtown Washington fell eerily silent after the federal government, seeing the swift-moving storm approaching, closed its doors and told civil servants- who already had the day off Monday for the Martin Luther King holiday- to stay home yesterday.
Today, federal agencies were to open two hours late. Employees could also take unscheduled leave, and those that can were allowed to work from home.
The nation's capital is famous for cowering in the face of even a few flakes but yesterday's storm seemed to justify a shutdown.
Many offices and schools followed suit, as 32 kilometer per hour winds whipped through the US capital's unusually quiet streets.
Most area schools, in the city and neighboring Maryland and Virginia, were to remain closed again today.
Washington's Metro public transit system reported yesterday half as many riders as on a typical weekday. Business was so slow that many restaurants used Twitter to woo customers with bargain-priced drinks while others offered customers 2-for-1 deals.
In Philadelphia, as of early evening yesterday, the official total at Philadelphia International Airport was 11 inches of snow, a record for the day January 21.
The "storm system will strengthen overnight in the Atlantic waters off the East Coast, spreading heavy snow and strong wind into coastal sections of New England and the Northeast," the National Weather Service said.
Temperatures across the eastern part of the country today is likely to be 10 to 25 degrees below average, amid bitter wind chills, it warned.
