In preparation for the storm, Rhode Islanders were out shopping the night before. Many shelves at East Side Market, a grocery store in Providence, were empty or thoroughly picked through by Thursday night.
At Bottles Fine Wine next door, one worker, Austin McDannell, 24, said he saw more customers than usual stop by during their lunch breaks Thursday to pick up provisions. He said he wasn’t sure if the store would open Friday morning, but his fiancé’s job at a beauty school in Cranston had already canceled work for Friday, and said if he had to hunker down in his home in Providence, he’d catch up on TV. “There’s always Netflix,” he said.
In Westerly, a seaside community on the Connecticut border that forecasters predicted could see 5 to 10 inches of snow during the course of the storm, the school district gave students and teachers a full snow day, without remote learning, the school’s superintendent, Mark Garceau, said. A message on the school’s website urges students to “go sledding, build a snowman.”
The snowy weather comes as the United States — from Montana to Colorado to Kentucky to Massachusetts — is facing a shortage of snow plow drivers, which has complicated removal efforts.
Officials have blamed the shortage partly on broader labor conditions; truck drivers have been in demand for years, and the industrywide shortage has reached record highs in recent months. A surge in the Omicron variant has worsened the situation, forcing some snow plow drivers to call out sick.
Some areas are going to great lengths to attract drivers. Watertown, Mass., is paying $200 per hour to drivers with a commercial license, with rates increasing as high as $310 if they have specialized equipment, The Boston Globe reported in November.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/nyregion/snow-northeast-power-outages.html
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