New York: March arrived with a powerful snowstorm that dumped more than 30 centimetres of snow on cities across the East Coast on Monday, grounding flights, jamming traffic and cancelling school for the first time in five years in the nation's largest public-school system.

In New York, 1.1 million students got a day off school, joining thousands of children from South Carolina to Pennsylvania to Maine who were also told to stay home because of treacherous weather.

As the Northeast dealt with the storm's impact — government offices were closed in Maine — Southerners were busy recuperating from the unusually intense blast of snow and ice that hit their region on Sunday. Some parts of Tennessee and North Carolina received more than 30 centimetres of snow. Atlanta received 10 centimetres, and the college town of Athens, about 13 centimetres.

“It looked like something out of a book, out of a fairy tale,'' said Athens resident Antonio Callaway, 34.

But it also brought a lot of trouble. Hundreds of thousands of homes lost power from Virginia to Georgia. Hundreds of flights were cancelled at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, and flights to the northeast corridor were still being delayed on Monday.

Hundreds of flights were cancelled and some airlines, such as JetBlue, allowed passengers who had been scheduled to travel on Sunday or Monday to or from Boston, New York, Maine, Virginia and North Carolina to rebook through tomorrow for free.

Stranded

Still, crowds of travellers who didn't check their flight status before heading to the airport, or got stuck trying to make connections, were left stranded at airports across the region.

Other travellers got stranded on roadways.

In South Carolina on Sunday, a stretch of Interstate 85 was blocked off by both downed power lines and a number of big-rig trucks that had splayed sideways on the road. The resulting traffic jam stretched for an estimated 32 kilometres and left hundreds of motorists in their cars overnight on either side of the North Carolina-South Carolina border.

The stuck motorists received check-ups throughout the evening from state troopers and other emergency personnel. In Cleveland County, North Carolina, 32 people were taken from their cars and allowed to bunk down in emergency shelters. A few ran out of gas as they waited in the cold. But there were no reports of serious injuries.

“Some chose the option to stay with their vehicle and make a [night] of it,'' Cleveland County Deputy Fire Marshall Perry Davis said. “Some of them made snowmen in the middle of the Interstate and had snowball fights, and just had a jolly ol' time.''

Persistent problems

The interstate was cleared by Monday. But elsewhere in the South, problems persisted.

In Georgia, which experienced 150,000 power outages, about 25,000 homes remained without power Monday afternoon, said Georgia Power spokeswoman Carol Boatwright.

Many of those were in northeast Georgia, which saw some of the heaviest snow. Boatwright said crews were fixing power lines only to have snow- and ice-laden tree limbs fall and take them down again.

“We're not making as much headway as we'd have hoped,'' she said.

By Erika Hayasaki and Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

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Heavy snowfall grips US East Coast