�‘Going to be a disaster’

So far, more than 7,000 flights originally scheduled for Friday and Saturday within, into or out of the United States have been canceled, according to the flight monitor flightaware.com.

In Washington, officials took the unusual step ahead of the storm of closing down the city�s rail and bus system from Friday night until Monday morning.

The Metro system -- the second busiest in the United States after New York -- serves about 700,000 customers a day in Washington, Maryland and Virginia.

Grocery store shelves were bare -- with toilet paper, milk, bread and alcohol conspicuously missing -- as residents anticipated impassable roads and power outages.

"I think it�s going to be a disaster," Sharonda Brown, a nurse, said as she waited for an Uber car with a full cart of groceries at a Washington supermarket.

If the blizzard leaves as much snow in Washington as forecast, it could surpass a record set in 1922 by a storm that dumped 28 inches over three days and killed 100 people after a roof collapsed at a theater.

US Capitol Police have said they were lifting a decades-old sledding ban, but the national monuments, Capitol building and Smithsonian museums were all closed.

Even a massive snowball fight in Washington�s Dupont Circle neighborhood, which nearly two thousand people said they would attend on Facebook, had to be postponed from Saturday to Sunday due to the storm�s ferocity.

(AFP)