No Son of Snowpocalypse on LI Friday

Snow is expected across Long Island Friday but with far less of a punch than the blizzard that hit the day after Christmas, weather forecasters said.

The latest forecasts call for 2 to 5 inches of snow before the system clears out by Friday night. The East End could get a bit more, said David Stark, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Upton.

"It still may be a respectable snowfall," Stark said.

Accumulation is expected to start around noon Friday and continue into the afternoon and early evening, making for a slippery commute later Friday Stark said.

"It's really not going to be a long duration," he said. "But when the snow moves in, we're expecting a heavier snow band to develop."

Motorists are urged to drive slowly and leave plenty of space between vehicles, Stark said.

"If it does come down as hard as we expect, it could certainly make the roads very messy," he said.

Snowfall is expected to taper off around 8 or 9 p.m., Stark said.

In preparation for what could be a slow, slippery evening commute, the LIRR has added eight additional eastbound trains out of Penn Station between 2:10 and 3:48 p.m. These include extra trains to Hicksville, Huntington, Babylon, Great Neck and Far Rockaway.

Acknowledging the MTA's "spotty performance" during last month's blizzard, transit officials said Thursday that they were preparing in earnest for Friday's expected snowfall, and reinstituting a plan that had been abandoned for years.

MTA New York City Transit president Thomas Prendergast said the biggest difference in the agency's snow response plan since last month's storm is that it has since set up "situation rooms" for the MTA's subway and bus operations. Inside the rooms, senior management officials will monitor problems in the system and make calls on how to address them.

Prendergast said senior management's lack of access to real-time information hampered the MTA's ability to bounce back from the last storm, during which some subway riders were stranded on trains for hours.

Prendergast said the subway system was already on its highest weather alert level since Thursday morning and had begun mobilizing crews and equipment.

The MTA also began outfitting some buses, including those in Nassau, with tire chains Thursday, officials said.