Storm rips Northeast; 1.5 million lose power
Falling trees down power lines; outages could last for days.
Hurricane-force winds and soaking rains pummel New England, felling trees and leading to a state of emergency in Maine.
A severe storm packing hurricane-force wind gusts and soaking rain swept through the Northeast 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 days. Trees also fell onto homes and vehi- cles, but no serious injuries were reported.
New England got the brunt of the storm, which brought sustained winds of up to 50 mph in spots. A gust of 130 mph was reported at the Mount Washington Obser- vatory in New Hampshire, while winds hit 82 mph in Mashpee on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.
The storm left 450,000 New Hampshire electricity customers without power at its peak and produced wind gusts of 78 mph, emergency officials said. Emergency Management Director Perry Plummer said the outage was the state’s fourth largest.
In Warr e n, choppy waters swept away a onestory home. Video shows it sailing downstream and crashing into a bridge. The home then crumbles into the water. The person who took the video, Thomas Babbit, told The Boston Globe the homeowners were not on the property at the time.
Maine also was hit hard, with 492,000 homes and businesses losing electricity, surpassing the peak number from an infamous 1998 ice storm. The Portland Inter- national Jetport recorded a wind gust of 69 mph, and the Amtrak Downeaster ser- vice canceled a morning run due to downed 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 2-year-old daughter, Priya, endured the storm in a yurt, where they are staying while building a house on their prop- erty. 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.”
The storm began making its way up the East Coast on Sunday, the fifth anniversary of Superstorm Sandy. That 2012 storm devastated the nation’s most populous areas and was blamed for at least 182 deaths in the U.S. and the Caribbean and more than $71 billion in damage in this country alone.
Electricity was slowly being restored. More than 1.2 million homes and busi- nesses still were without power in the Northeast late Monday afternoon, according to a tally of outages from utility companies in more than a half-dozen states.
A tree fell and sheared off the rear of a home in Methuen in northeastern Massachusetts, along the New Hampshire line. The tree crashed into Philip Cole’s bedroom, where he would have been if he hadn’t been called into work Sunday night.
“You opened the door to my bedroom, and there’s no bedroom,” Cole told WBZ-TV. “There’s no floor, there’s no anything really, just a closet and that was it.”
In Glastonbury, Connecticut, downed trees and wires forced schools to close.
Some rivers in New Hamp- shire overflowed. For a brief period Monday, the Ammonoosuc River flooded, restricting access to the Omni Mount Washington Resort in Bretton Woods.
In Plainfield, Vermont, the Maplefields convenience store had no power, so work- ers used a propane stove to make coffee.
Cities and towns in New England have pushed back trick-or-treating from Halloween night — Tuesday — to as late as Sunday evening due to safety concerns.
The storm system also caused problems Sunday in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.
On the shoreline in Bayonne, New Jersey, a barge washed up after apparently breaking free from its moorings.
In New York, the rush hour got off to a rocky start as service on Metro-North’s Danbury Branch in Connecticut was suspended due to a mudslide and signal power problems. Part of the Long Island Rail Road’s Ronkonkoma Branch was halted because of power lines on the tracks.