Snow Prompts 2 Choices On East Coast: Stay Put Or Dig Out

At the start of the work week, many offices from Virginia to New York are closed, and road crews are working to clear streets as residents dig themselves out of a blizzard's snowfall. Flight schedules, riddled by cancellations, will likely take days to get back to normal.

They're coping with massive amounts of snow that, despite all the shoveling and plowing, will only start to go away once temperatures rise — something that will happen emphatically Tuesday, when much of the Interstate 95 corridor in the Mid-Atlantic will see melting from temperatures in the 40s.

Here are updates on how things stand in areas that were hit hard by this weekend's blizzard:

Airlines have canceled more than 1,450 flights with U.S. connections that were scheduled for Monday, with an additional 505 delays, according to the FlightAware website. Around 11 a.m. ET Monday, two airports still had cancellation rates higher than 40 percent: Newark Liberty and Washington Dulles.

That's in addition to the more than 7,500 flights that were canceled over the weekend. As airports resume at least partial operations, anyone with flight plans is being advised to check with their airline before leaving for the airport — and to rebook the flight remotely, rather than at airports.

Washington, D.C., closed its public schools for Monday; some districts in the area have already announced they're also closed Tuesday. The federal government's offices are closed today.

Schools, government offices and businesses were also either closed or opening late Monday in Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York City.

Late last night, Delaware Gov. Jack Markell announced that he was lifting a state of emergency. In addition to snowy roads, the storm brought a surge of strong waves that flooded areas along the coast and washed away dunes.

The large storm that raged Friday and Saturday left 26.6 inches of snow in New York's Central Park; elsewhere, measurements of 20 inches and above were common.

More than 3 feet of snow fell in parts of West Virginia — and that was an even bigger problem near Shepherdstown, where livestock manager Lars Prillaman of Greengate Farm needed to look after his animals.

Prillaman tells NPR's Morning Edition how he made sure the pigs, chickens and sheep got fed:

"We hitched our draft horse to what's called a stone boat — it's basically a small sled — and off we went. And she got us out there, fed everybody ... and, yeah, she's better than any tractor or truck I've ever owned."

As Camila wrote yesterday, many people are embracing the blizzard's copious amounts of snow. Among them: actor and director Casey Neistat, who filmed himself snowboarding through the streets of New York, being pulled by a Jeep.