PROVIDENCE, R.I. — A powerful nor'easter that moved into Southern New England Saturday should leave near-record snowfall before winding down late tonight, according to the National Weather Service.
With wind gusts building to 60 mph, the storm could also knock out power and flood the coast.
Gov. Dan McKee said Saturday afternoon that a travel ban announced earlier would be lifted at midnight, bridges will reopen then, and state testing sites for COVID-19 will resume at noon Sunday.
RIPTA will resume bus service tomorrow morning.
At his late afternoon press conference, McKee also joked that Jan. 29 will be remembered as the day Tom Brady announced his upcoming retirement rather than the Blizzard of 2022.
McKee said the storm, which when finished was to dump 2 feet of snow in Rhode Island, is expected to become the greatest accumulation in a 24-hour period.
Because visibility continues to be bad, McKee is extending the travel ban for passenger vehicle and tractor-trailers. Some communities in South County had to pull their plows off the roads this afternoon but they are now back.
The Block Island ferry will also resume service Sunday.
Warming centers are open throughout the state, and Rhode Islanders can go to riema.ri.gov for more information.
“To have things go this smoothly is a credit to our workforce,” McKee said at a press briefing at the emergency management center in Cranston.
“Our goal is to make this a nonevent,” he said, adding he would get his snow rake out tomorrow. “We feel like things are going well. But we still have a great deal of work to do.”
National Grid said there were 700 outages at the peak of the storm but as of 4 p.m., only 67 remained.
Massachusetts, however, got slammed, with 100,000 outages, many clustered along the eastern shore and Cape Cod.
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