Residents of the US east coast began digging out from under a thick blanket of snow on Sunday after a record-breaking blizzard paralysed Washington and the region, snapping power to 350,000 residents and killing two people.

The monster storm stretched more than 600 miles from eastern Indiana across into New Jersey and then down as far south as North Carolina, affecting tens of millions of Americans.

With winds gusting at almost 60 an hour, meteorologists said they had recorded snowfall as high as 38 inches near Baltimore, Maryland — a record.

As of late afternoon on Saturday, a total of 32.4 inches was recorded at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington — another record, according to the National Weather Service.

That two-day accumulation beat the previous record, compiled during the blizzard of January 1996, the service said.

The heavy, sticky snow toppled trees and snapped power lines, leaving more than 350,000 people without electricity in Maryland and neighboring Virginia.

“Snowmageddon here in DC,” President Barack Obama told Democrats in a speech, only a year after chiding the capital for over responding to small snowfalls. Forecasters warned residents to hunker down, with no let-up in the weather for most of the day, and said chilly temperatures on Sunday would mean the wet snow would swiftly turn icy.

“Officially this won’t break records in DC, but unofficially, you bet it will,” Paul Kochin, an expert in northeast weather systems, told AFP.

“It’s very rare to have two such big storms in one season,” he said, after the capital region was crippled by a smaller but still massive storm in December.

Maryland and Virginia, were bearing the brunt of the storm and seeing the highest snowfalls, he said. “It’s pretty rough out there,” agreed Ed McDonough from the Maryland Emergency Management Agency. In terms of the Baltimore-Washington corridor, “this is probably the biggest storm we’ve ever had,” he said.

Emergency teams struggled to repair the power cuts were hampered by the miserable weather.

“We have a lot of scattered outages and the road conditions are not really working with us,” admitted Pepco spokesman Andre Francis, pleading for patience as some customers were told the blackouts could last days.

Some 200 National Guardsmen had been deployed across Maryland, while in Virginia police confirmed that a father and son were killed Friday when they were hit by another vehicle after stopping to help a stranded car.

Police in the state had responded to some 3,167 calls for help, more than two-thirds of which were due to car accidents or stranded vehicles.

Three state troopers were also injured in storm-related accidents in Virginia. All flights out of the capital’s Reagan National airport were cancelled, along with most flights out of the Dulles International Airport in Virginia, while there was limited service at Baltimore.

Date : 08/02/2010. News by Newsofap.com