Howling Winds Put Northeast in Deep Freeze

Howling winds and plummeting temperatures Wednesday turned the Northeast into a giant icebox from Maine to New York City.

Atop Mt. Washington in New Hampshire, winds gusted to 110 m.p.h. early Wednesday and, with the temperature at 17 degrees below zero, the wind chill was minus 85 degrees.

“That’s cold enough to make you put your earmuffs on,” Peter Crane at the Mt. Washington Observatory said. He said winds at the summit averaged 89 m.p.h.

An ice climber who got lost Tuesday on the 6,288-foot mountain (the highest peak in the Northeast) was rescued Wednesday. Jim Church of Pleasantville, N. Y., was found by rescue crews as he began his descent from the mountain.

Climber Got Frostbite

“He’s essentially OK, but he does have some cold injury to his feet,” Mike Torrey of the Appalachian Mountain Club said. “The fact that he survived at all is to his credit.”

Church sheltered himself in scrub pines below the summit to ward off the cold, officials said.

Hundreds of homeless people crowded into New York City shelters Wednesday as temperatures hovered in the upper teens and winds gusted to 35 m.p.h., officials said.

At Caribou, Me., brisk winds dropped the chill factor to between 45 and 55 degrees below zero Wednesday afternoon, the National Weather Service reported.

Forecasters blamed the wind and cold on the first major storm of 1989, which dumped up to 8 inches of snow on parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania but skipped across the East Coast without producing the heavy snow that had been predicted.

Weather Service spokesman Lyle Alexander said the storm was well out in the Atlantic Ocean, but it intensified once it hit the water and pulled Arctic air and strong winds into the East from Canada.

Elsewhere in the nation, high temperatures in at least five cities broke or tied records on Wednesday. Brownsville, Tex., with 85 degrees, North Platte, Neb., at 61, and Norfolk, Neb., at 53, set records. Jamestown, N. D., with 41 degrees, and Devil’s Lake, N. D., with 36 degrees, tied existing marks.

Meanwhile, a storm moving in from the West Coast dropped 4 inches of snow on Flagstaff, Ariz., and freezing rain glazed highways at the Navajo National Monument. Rain spread through much of the desert Southwest and caused minor street flooding at Kingman, Ariz.