NEW YORK – A powerful storm buried sections of the Northeast under a near-record 2 feet of wind-blown snow Sunday, marooning thousands of travelers whose flights were grounded and making even a walk to the corner store treacherous.

Wind gusting as high as 60 mph blew the snow sideways and raised a risk of coastal flooding in New England. And in a rare display, lightning lit up the falling snow before dawn in the New York and Philadelphia areas, producing muffled winter thunder.

As the snowfall tapered off during the afternoon, the National Weather Service reported that 24.8 inches had fallen by 1 p.m. in Central Park, the second-highest tally since record-keeping started in 1869. The record was 26.4 inches in December 1947 and there was no immediate indication if it would be passed.

“We might not see anything like this again in our lifetime,” Jason Rosenfarb said as he walked with his 5-year-old daughter Haley in Central Park. Just then Haley jumped head first into the snow and said: “Help me out. There’s too much snow.”

The storm came on the heels of an unusually mild January that had people shedding jackets and ski resorts lamenting lost business.

“It’s sort of crazy because it was so warm a couple of weeks ago and now we have knee-deep snow,” said Skye Drynan, walking her dogs Bella and Forest in lower Manhattan.

Elsewhere, 21 inches of snow fell at Columbia, Md., between Baltimore and Washington, and at East Brunswick, N.J., Hartford, Conn., and West Caln Township west of Philadelphia, the National Weather Service said. Philadelphia’s average for an entire winter is about 21 inches.

“It’s going to be a menace trying to clean it up,” said Mayor Scott T. Rumana in Wayne, N.J. New York officials said snow removal costs the city about $1 million per inch.

The possibility of flooding was a major concern for Massachusetts as wind hit 60 mph, said Peter Judge, spokesman for the state’s Emergency Management Agency. Meteorologists predicted 2 1/2-foot storm surges with seas off the coast running up to 25 feet.