Faces six counts
Minor flooding seen as some areas get month’s worth of rain in 48 hours
Grand jury indicts Hudson man for attempted murder in 2017 incident.
The risk of flooding in the Capital Region subsided Monday but meteorologists said heavy rain from Henri caused minor flooding Monday along the Schoharie Creek and fueled sporadic downpours in isolated spots around the region and the Hudson Valley.
The National Weather Service in Albany reports Middleburghwas drenched with 3.2 inches of rain after the storm hit upstate New York on Sunday and there was minor flooding of the creek near the Gilboa Bridge in Gilboa.
The dying remnants of the storm popped up in isolated spots Monday. Tannersville was hit with a downpour that dropped an inch of rain at midday and spurred worries about flooding of streams around the Greene County community. Residents of southern Rensselaer County were warned about possible flooding after a storm cell hit the region later in the afternoon.
The Schoharie Valley and the Catskill Mountains got a serious soaking from the storm on Sunday and Monday, but the Weather Service canceled a flood watch in the Albany area where rainfall was more modest.
Henri, which came ashore Sunday in Rhode Island as a tropical storm only to be downgraded to a tropical depression when wind gusts diminished, spared the Capital Region from the heavy wind and some of the rain that was predicted. Few power outages were caused by the storm in the region or the Hudson Valley.
Officials feared the combination of saturated soil and wind would bring down trees and power lines in the Albany area but the absence of powerful winds limited the damage.
Albany received about 0.69 inches of rain and Troy measured 0.91 inches. South Berne in southern Albany County received 2.25 inches of rain and Spencertown in Columbia County got 2.16 inches, according to the weather service.
The storm delivered heavier rain downstate and in Connecticut and northern New Jersey. The town of Cranbury in New Jersey received more than 8 inches of rain as the storm's western bands swirled.
“Thankfully, we were spared that much,” said Tom Wasula, a meteorologist with the Weather Service's Albany office.
Rain was still falling Monday morning in the New York City area as well as in its closest northern suburbs. The storm was expected to produce periods of heavy rain, especially in the midhudson Valley, northwestern Connecticut and in the Berkshire Mountains in Massachusetts.
Most areas in the Hudson Valley received a baseline of one month’s worth of rain in 48 hours, while some pockets, mostly in Orange County, received nearly 6 inches of rain, the equivalent of nearly two months’ worth of rain in the same period.
“With this particular storm, because it hit well to the east off of Long Island, the unique feature for the Hudson Valley here was enormous amounts of rain,” said Michael Schlacter, a climatologist and meteorologist from the lower Hudson Valley. “Rain can be on either side of the storm, but in this particular case north and west of the storm.”
Schlacter explained that Henri wasn’t working alone. There was an “upper level low,” where a cold pool of air resides at a high altitude, that was occurring in the Pennsylvania and New Jersey area. That helped produced extra moisture for the region.
“They merged and combined forces,” said Schlacter. “That’s why there was not only a lot of cumulative rain, but we also had periods where it was quite torrential rain starting Saturday night, periodically on Sunday and even early this morning.”
“That moisture is not done,” he said. “If we get a little bit of sunshine, clearing or warmth, that can jack up the instability in the atmosphere, and we might get bands of classic summertime thunderstorms.”
He expected it wouldn’t be until late Monday that the aftershocks of the storm would be in the rear view.
The remnants of the storm remained near the New Yorkconnecticut border Monday morning but the storm was expected to eventually move east across New England before heading out to sea on Tuesday.
Henri dropped drenching rain across a huge swath that stretched from eastern Pennsylvania to Cape Cod, leaving more than 140,000 homes and businesses without power. It cut its path across Connecticut before stalling over the New York border.
The flood watch remained in effect in Columbia, Greene, Dutchess and Ulster counties where meteorologists were watching for localized flooding as well as Hudson River flooding in Dutchess County.