NOR’EASTER CUTS POWER TO HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS
Hurricane-force winds from an early-season nor’easter swept through coastal New England on Wednesday, a day after battering the New York City area, sending trees crashing onto power lines and cutting electricity to hundreds of thousands of households.
The winds, which gusted to 94 mph on Martha’s Vineyard in the predawn hours, picked up a small aircraft at the New Bedford Regional Airport, lifting it over a fence and onto a roadway, and peeled the roof off an apartment building in Quincy, Mass., snapping the 8-inch bolts that held it down.
“Something extreme happened in order to cause this much damage,” James Marathas, executive director of the Quincy Housing Authority, said.
Scores of Massachusetts communities canceled school for the day, and subway and commuter rail service was delayed while employees removed debris and fallen trees from the tracks. At 7 p.m., more than 400,000 customers in Massachusetts, nearly 50,000 in Rhode Island and about 3,000 in Connecticut were without power.
The Weather Service in Boston warned coastal residents, “For your safety indoors, stay away from windows!” It said the Nantucket area had experienced a bomb cyclone, an explosive deepening of pressure that can lead to powerful wind gusts.
National Grid, an energy provider for New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, dispatched 2,400 field personnel to repair damaged wires, poles and transmission lines, the company said in a statement, describing “significant impact to our system” that could last days in some places.
The same storm struck the New York City area Tuesday with heavy rain, strong winds and the threat of flash floods, although the region was largely spared the type of deadly extreme weather brought by the remnants of Hurricane Ida last month.