Storm hits Northeast with floods, rain, over 1 million customer lose power

Saturday, March 3, 2018

A violent storm is ready to strike the Northeast with heavy rains, howling winds and mighty waves for a second day Saturday.

The nor’easter has already claimed five lives.

Furthermore it has been responsible for the cancellation of over 3,300 flights, interrupted traffic and knocked out power to over 1 million customers with more than 440,000, of them in Massachusetts.

Virginia had at least 301,671 customers without power and the Washington D.C. area that counted over 154,000 people who went without power.

Masachusetts is bearing the brunt of the storm that hit Friday and is not expected to ease up till Saturday. High tides powered the coastal flooding in Boston and other towns and left the city streets awash for the second time since a major nor’easter in early January.

Record-setting high tides are likely to strike Boston Harbor late Friday night and late Saturday morning.

Thereafter kayakers paddled down Boston streets and national guardsmen that rescued 50 people from their homes in nearby Quincy. At times they carried them to safety in the coopers of front-end loaders as reported by a leading news media house.

Twenty-two million people were under a coastal flooding warning as of Friday.

Charlie Baker who is the Governor of Massachusetts mentioned that he had called in the National Guard and sought for vigilance. He advised people not to ride outside under the stormy conditions.

Kurt Schwartz, director of the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency mentioned that people in these homes must plan properly for a prolonged outage, at a Friday news conference. MEMA also said that five people have died.

The authorities declared that a 77-year-old woman in Kingsville, Maryland, an 11-year-old boy in Putnam County, New York, a 44-year-old man in James City County, Virginia, a juvenile in Chesterfield County, Virginia, a Newport, Rhode Island who was in his 70’s, all were killed by falling trees.

The storm had metamorphosed into a ‘bomb cyclone’ late Friday morning when it went through bombogenesis that was signaled by a sudden decline in atmospheric pressure.

Over 3,000 US flights have been cancelled including a large number at the busiest airports in New York, Philadelphia and Boston as per the reports of the flight-tracking website FlightAware.com.

Airlines, including Delta, United and Southwest, are offering fee waivers for flight cancellations or changes involving affected airports.

Airport on the East Coast have been witnessing ground stops and delays, as per the Federal Aviation Administration. Amtrak also declared that it had to suspend train service between New York and Boston.

Snow that falls is likely to be quite wet and heavy that might bring down trees and power lines and also lead to power outages.

Major cities in the Northeast like New York and Philadelphia might receive a wintry mix of rain, sleet and snow with no snow accumulation that have been forecast.

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