The Oneida Daily Dispatch (Oneida, NY)
Storm wreaks havoc in Northeast
NEWYORK(AP) » People along the Northeast coast braced for more flooding during high tides Saturday even as the powerful storm that inundated roads, snapped trees and knocked out power to more than 2 million homes and businesses moved hundreds of miles out to sea.
More than 200,000 utility customers remained without electricity Saturday following one of the most damaging storms to hit many parts of New York State since Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
The nor’easter continued to cause travel delays a day after it hammered the region Friday, including temporarily knocking out Amtrak service between Washington D.C. and New York before
it was restored Saturday morning. Other train lines suffered similar harm, with delays lingering well after the storm departed.
Dozens of flights were canceled Saturday, a day after over 1,000 flights were canceled at New York’s three major airports. But airports, like the rest of the state, were recovering.
The storm, combining winds up to 50 mph with up to 3 inches of rain and up to 2 feet of snow, left large portions of the state damaged. The utility Central Hudson called it a historic storm, one of the most powerful to hit the state’s Mid-Hudson Valley in the last 50 years. It said the 109,000 customers who lost power was topped only by a February 2010 storm that knocked out power to 240,000 customers and two storms in 2011.
“We expect service restoration to take place over the course of several days due to the severity and widespread nature of the damage, with the vast majority of impacted customers’ service restored by Wednesday afternoon,” said Charles A. Freni, a senior vice president at the company.
“As the winds begin to subside, we will be able to complete our damage assessments and provide restoration estimates for our customers by area,” he added in a release.
Areas from Maryland to Maine remained under flood warnings. Officials in eastern Massachusetts, where dozens of people were rescued from high waters overnight, warned of another round of flooding during high tides expected around noon.
As Saturday’s midday high tide arrived, heavy surf crashed into the cliffs along Cape Cod Bay in Bourne, Massachusetts, drawing dozens of onlookers to watch churning brown waves take big bites 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, who lives in the hard-hit village of Sagamore Beach.
Up the coast in Scituate, Massachusetts, Becky Smith watched as ocean waters started to fill up a nearby marina’s parking lot from her vantage point at the Barker Tavern, a restaurant overlooking the harbor.
“It looks like a war zone,” she said, describing the scene in the coastal town near Boston where powerful waves dumped sand and rubble on roads and winds uprooted massive trees. “It’s a lot of debris, big rocks and pieces of wood littering the streets.”
Residents in other coastal areas, meanwhile, 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. More than 2 million homes and businesses remained without power Saturday.
“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, Massachusetts. “Usually when you think of bad weather in New England, you think of snow. But it’s been all wind and coastal flooding.”
Authorities on Saturday reported two more deaths from the storm, bringing the total to at least seven in the Northeast. A 25-yearold man in Connecticut and a 57-year- old Pennsylvania man were killed when trees fell on their cars Friday.
The other five people killed included two children. A man and a 6-yearold boy were killed in different parts of Virginia, while an 11-year-old boy in New York state and a man in Rhode Island, both died. A 77-year-old woman died after being struck by a branch outside her home near Baltimore.
The National Weather Service expected wind gusts of up to 40 mph (64 kph) in coastal areas Saturday, down from Friday’s hurricane-force gusts.