CLEVELAND — Grocery shoppers did what grocery shoppers often do as a major snowstorm bore down on the Great Lakes: They bought a little extra, just in case.
“I’m here to get the stuff I need to make spaghetti sauce,” said Edwina Neal while waiting in a line about a dozen people deep at a supermarket in the Shaker Heights neighborhood on Wednesday evening.
“If I have to stay home for a few days, I’ll have what I need to eat,” Ms. Neal said. “But we’re used to this kind of snowfall in Cleveland.”
Although maybe not. About 3 to 6 inches fell in the area overnight, keeping many commuters off the roads and forcing schools and colleges to close or move to remote learning, and forecasters predicted that 12 to 16 total inches would fall before the day is done.
If so, that would be close to or above the city’s one-day record of 13.6 inches that fell on Feb. 23, 1999.
Still, in Lakewood, Ohio, a suburb just west of Cleveland, the region seemed to be handling the snowfall just fine, with the streets clear and the stores open on Thursday morning. A mid-January snowfall of 15 inches over two days led to the suspension of mass transit, but buses and trains were operating early Thursday.
“I’m hoping they can run for this snowstorm, because a lot of us need those services to get to work,” said Ariel Hawthorne, an office cleaning worker waiting for a light rail train on Wednesday night. “We need to eat and we need to get to work, and not all of us have a car to do those things.”
