Deadly storm batters Northeastern US, knocking out power, grounding flights and flooding roads
PORTLAND, Maine — A storm barreled into the Northeastern U.S. on Monday, flooding roads and downing trees, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands, forcing flight cancellations and school closures, and killing at least four people.
More than 5 inches (13 centimeters) of rain fell in parts of New Jersey and northeastern Pennsylvania by mid-morning, and parts of several other states got more than 4 inches (10 centimeters), according to the National Weather Service. Wind gusts reached nearly 70 mph (113 kph) along the southern New England shoreline.
Power was knocked out for hundreds of thousands of customers in an area stretching from Virginia north through New England, including over 278,000 in Massachusetts and 350,000 in Maine, according to poweroutage.us.
The weather service issued flood and flash-flood warnings for New York City and the surrounding area, parts of Pennsylvania, upstate New York, western Connecticut, western Massachusetts and parts of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
An 89-year-old Hingham, Massachusetts, man was killed early Monday when high winds caused a tree to fall on a trailer, authorities said. In Windham, Maine, police said part of a tree fell and killed a man who was removing debris from his roof.
In Catskill, New York, a driver was killed after the vehicle went around a barricade on a flooded road and was swept into the Catskill Creek, the Times Union reported. A man was pronounced dead in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, after he was found in a submerged vehicle Monday morning.
On Sunday in South Carolina, one person died when their vehicle flooded on a road in a gated community in Mount Pleasant.
Five months after flooding inundated Vermont’s capital city of Montpelier, water entered the basements of some downtown businesses as the city monitored the level of the Winooski River, officials said.
Authorities in the village of Moretown, Vermont, urged residents to evacuate some 30 to 50 homes because of flooding.
