Hurricane-force winds, rain rip up New England states
HARTFORD, Conn. — A severe storm packing hurricane-force wind gusts and soaking rain swept through the northeast United States early Monday, knocking out power for nearly 1.5 million homes and businesses and forcing hundreds of schools to close in New England.
Falling trees knocked down power lines across the region, and some utility companies warned customers that power could be out for a few days. Trees also fell onto some homes and vehicles, but no serious injuries were reported.
New England got the brunt of the storm, which brought sustained winds of up to 50 m.p.h. in some spots. A gust of 130 m.p.h. was reported at the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire, while winds hit 82 m.p.h. in Mashpee on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
Utility company officials said it could be several days before power is restored in some parts of New England.
Maine was hit hard, with 492,000 homes and businesses losing electricity, surpassing the peak number from an infamous 1998 ice storm. The Portland International Jetport recorded a wind gust of 69 m.p.h., and the Amtrak Downeaster service cancelled a morning run due to down trees on the tracks.
Republican Maine Gov. Paul LePage issued a state of emergency proclamation, allowing drivers of electrical line repair vehicles to work more hours than federal law allows to speed up power restoration.
In Freeport, Maine, Rachel Graham, her husband and their two-year-old daughter, Priya, endured the storm in a yurt where they are staying while building a house on their property. They listened as 20 pine trees on their property snapped and wind lashed the yurt.
“It was really terrifying. You could feel everything and hear everything,” Graham said. “It was a lot of crashes and bangs.”
In hindsight, she and her husband said it wasn’t safe to have been in the yurt, but it was also unsafe to leave at the height of the storm.
The storm began making its way up the East Coast on Sunday, which also was the fifth anniversary of Superstorm Sandy. That 2012 storm devastated the nation’s most populous areas, was blamed for at least 182 deaths in the U.S. and Caribbean and more than $71 billion in damage in this country alone.
In the Boston suburb of Brookline, Helene Dunlap said her power went out after she heard a loud “kaboom” around 1:30 a.m. Monday. She went outside hours later to find a large tree had fallen on a neighbouring home.
“It really shook the whole place up,” she said. “It was such a dark, stormy night that looking out the window we really couldn’t determine what was going on.”