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It was a storm of record consequence, disrupting large swaths of the Northeast in ways large and small: towns were buried in dense snowfalls, closing down streets, schools and even, in some cases, Halloween celebrations.
By the time the great snowstorm of October 2011 finally ended early Sunday, more than three million customers would find themselves without power and with the prospect of enduring several more days without it. The unseasonably early nor’easter had utility companies struggling to restore electricity to homes and businesses. By early Monday, the number of customers without power was still above 2 million but falling.
People emptied stores of generators and chain saws and flocked to town halls to charge phones on emergency power. In Worcester, Mass., a wedding with cranberry dresses and flowers the colors of fall foliage ended up soggy and white. In Glen Rock, N.J., orderly suburban blocks became a maze, with fallen branches draped across nearly every street.
Communities in New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts and New Hampshire expected schools to remain closed for several days as they cleaned up downed electrical wires and fallen branches. And in Central Park, as many as 1,000 trees may be lost — eight times the damage suffered after Tropical Storm Irene.
But in the most telling sign of how the snow had turned seasons topsy-turvy — throwing an icy and sometimes lethal blanket over trees whose leaves were often still green — the storm threatened to obliterate Halloween.
In “as they cleaned up downed electrical wires and fallen branches” (R.20-21) , the term “downed” (R.20) could be replaced by turned down without changing the original meaning of the text.