2.5M still without power in East after storm

One day after Tropical Storm Isaias swept through the New York region, snapping trees and branches, utility crews were struggling to restore power to nearly 2.5 million customers as officials acknowledged that some outages could linger for days.

On Wednesday morning, the most widespread outages were reported in northern New Jersey, suburbs just north of New York City and much of the entire state of Connecticut.

The scale of the damage was extensive: Con Edison reported that the outage in its service area in New York City and Westchester County was second only to Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

“We’ve had over 16,000 service requests for downed trees, which I think is the most we’ve ever had in the city,” Deanne Criswell, the city’s emergency management commissioner, said in an interview Wednesday morning with the television station WPIX.

Gov. Philip Murphy of New Jersey said at a news conference Wednesday morning that while many people should expect to have their power restored Wednesday, some outages could continue for longer.

“We’ve got to be very realistic,” the governor said. “This could be a number of days for folks.”

He said earlier Wednesday that the damage could have been worse if the storm had not moved so quickly through the area.

“Like a knife through hot butter,” he told a local radio station.

By Wednesday morning, the immediate threat of strong winds and heavy rains had passed, as the storm had crossed into Canada and was expected to dissipate Thursday.

But reports of damage could be found all along the path that Isaias took up the East Coast on Tuesday after making landfall in North Carolina. The storm left a trail of flood and fires, with some of its most devastating effects caused by a series of tornadoes that it spawned in several states — a scene that many officials said was another layer of pain for communities already struggling with the coronavirus.

Two people who were killed when a tornado struck a neighborhood in northeast North Carolina. A woman died in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, when a tree toppled by the winds landed on her vehicle.

In New York City, a 60-year-old man who was sitting on the passenger side of a car in Briarwood, Queens, was killed Tuesday when a tree fell on the vehicle and a 49-year-old woman was critically injured when she was struck by a falling tree branch in Brooklyn, police said.

On Wednesday morning, residents emerged from their homes to find toppled trees, downed power lines and broken branches littering the streets and crushing vehicles. Many streets were still blocked off to vehicles by trees.

Some rail service was still suspended as workers cleared tracks of trees and other debris and repair signals, according to the Long Island Rail Road.

Scott G. Morgan, the administrator and emergency management coordinator for Upper Township, New Jersey, a seaside community near the southern tip of the state, said the authorities were surveying damage caused by a tornado that touched down Tuesday morning.

The property damage was extensive, he said, but there were no reports of injuries and only one family was displaced.

“It could have been significantly worse,” Morgan said in an interview as he used a drone to survey the damage. “We’re not used to tornadoes in this area.”

The tornado came in off the Atlantic Ocean near Strathmere, New Jersey, but did not immediately make landfall. It left a corridor of downed trees and vegetation on either side of the Garden State Parkway, which the tornado had crossed over.

“You can see a definite cut right through the woods on either side,” he said.

Morgan had already spent months dealing with another crisis: the coronavirus pandemic. He offered a grim chuckle when asked what it was like to be handling the clean up from a tornado, which he said was rare for that area of South Jersey.

“It’s like I wish 2020 would not have even shown its face,” Morgan said. “It’s just been one hellacious year — for all of us.”