High tides cause more floods; more than 2M without power
Coastal communities in the Northeast experienced damaging high tide flooding Saturday even as residents tried to shake off a nor’easter that had knocked out power to more than 2 million homes and businesses from Virginia to Maine. Nine people have died because of the storm.
All along Massachusetts’ heavily populated coast that includes Boston and Cape Cod, Saturday’s midday high tide saw roaring, white-capped waves crashing onto shorelines, the churning surf battering beachfront homes, dousing docks and harbors and taking huge chunks out of the eroding coastline.
“We’ve been here a long time and we’ve never seen it as bad as this,” said Alex Barmashi, as he took in the fearsome spectacle along Cape Cod Bay in Bourne, Mass.
Up the coast in Scituate, Mass., Becky Smith assessed the damage wrought in the coastal town near Boston, where on Friday powerful ocean waves dumped mounds of sand and rubble on roads and winds uprooted entire trees. “It looks like a war zone,” she said. “Just a lot of debris, big rocks and pieces of wood littering the streets.”
Residents bailed out basements and surveyed the damage while waiting for power to be restored, a process that power companies warned could take days in parts.
“The rest of today will be clean up,” said Miles Grant, after he secured a generator to run a pump to remove standing water from his basement in Marion, Mass. “Usually when you think of bad weather in New England, you think of snow. But it’s been all wind and coastal flooding.”
By Saturday evening, power outages on the East Coast had dipped by about 500,000 from a peak of 2 million earlier in the day. Officials said the lingering wind gusts — up to 40 mph in some areas — were slowing power-repair efforts even though the main thrust of the storm had moved about 350 miles southeast of Cape Cod that morning.
The death toll from the storm increased by four, with authorities saying at least nine people lost their lives.
A 41-year-old New Jersey man was killed Friday night when he came in contact with live power lines. A 25-year-old man in Connecticut, a 57-year-old Pennsylvania man and a 37-year-old Massachusetts man were killed when trees fell on their vehicles Friday. The other five people killed included two children. A man and a 6-year-old boy were killed in different parts of Virginia, while an 11-year-old boy in New York state and a man in Rhode Island have died. A 77year-old woman died after being struck by a branch outside her home near Baltimore.