Rizky Amelia
A powerful nor'easter lashed the northeastern United States for a second consecutive day on Sunday, battering the Atlantic shoreline with heavy rain, blistering winds and a surging ocean that left neighbourhoods underwater and tens of thousands of households in the dark. The slow-moving system, which first arrived on Friday, was still delivering intense precipitation, damaging gusts and dangerous surf from New Jersey through New York and into New England as it slowly spun across the region.
In New Jersey, tidal surges pushed seawater into low-lying communities on Sunday, flooding streets and forcing residents and business owners to wade through murky water to clean up. One photograph from Sea Bright showed people scrubbing down the interior of a flooded pizza restaurant, mopping and washing while standing ankle-deep in water that had swept in from the adjacent bay. The scene captured a pattern repeated across the state's shoreline towns, where residents are accustomed to nuisance flooding but not to water rising this quickly.
Rainfall totals since Friday exceeded 10cm (4 inches) in some New Jersey locations, and forecasters said that volume, combined with an elevated ocean, produced flood depths that residents described as unprecedented in nearly a decade — even in areas that regularly deal with high water. In New York City, streets in the Howard Beach area of Queens were inundated, with water filling roadways and pooling around homes in a neighbourhood built on low ground along Jamaica Bay.
Wind proved just as destructive as the water. On Long Island, powerful gusts toppled trees onto homes and crushed utility poles, snapping lines and knocking out electricity to large swaths of the island's coastal and suburban communities. The damage to infrastructure — as much as to private property — is what utility crews will have to work through first before they can begin restoring service to the scores of thousands of customers affected.
The storm has also been deadly. A New York City housing authority worker was killed when a tree fell on Saturday, the first reported fatality associated with the system, which has left emergency responders dealing with downed lines, blocked roads and submerged streets in multiple states.
The storm's sluggish movement is the reason the damage has stretched over several days. National Weather Service lead forecaster Bob Oravec, based in College Park, Maryland, said the system was gradually weakening but warned that tidal flooding would continue through Sunday night's high-tide cycles. The heaviest of the remaining rain was expected on Sunday from northern New Jersey into southern New England, where the storm was forecast to maintain heavy rain, strong winds and hazardous surf conditions.
More than 100,000 electricity customers across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic lost power at various points on Sunday, according to outage tracker PowerOutage.us. The most extensive blackouts were recorded in counties along the coast from New Jersey to Connecticut — precisely the corridor where fallen trees and snapped poles were most numerous and where salt exposure accelerates wear on electrical equipment.
Travel was disrupted up and down the Eastern seaboard. More than 250 flights had been cancelled at Boston Logan International Airport by late Sunday morning, according to the Massachusetts Port Authority, with wind gusts reaching 64km/hour (40 mph) hindering aircraft operations. Numerous other flights along the coast were cancelled or delayed, stranding passengers across the region as airlines worked to rebook travellers through the height of the storm.
Nor'easters — storms that develop off the coast of the Mid-Atlantic and New England and blow from the northeast — are a fixture of late summer and autumn. When they stall or move slowly, they can prolong rainfall, pile water against coastal infrastructure and produce surge flooding long after the centre of the storm has passed inland. Residents along the New Jersey shore and in Queens were reminded of Hurricane Sandy, which inflicted more than $60bn in damage across the eastern United States in 2012. This system's impacts, while serious, fall far short of that scale, but the images of waves slamming into sea walls and overtopping beaches have revived concerns about long-term coastal erosion in vulnerable shoreline communities.
Meteorologists have also flagged the possibility that this storm is a preview of what is to come. An El Niño climate pattern is disrupting weather patterns this year, and forecasters cautioned that the current system could be the first of several significant coastal storms to strike the East Coast this autumn. In Rye, New Hampshire, residents were photographed watching the churning ocean as the nor'easter hit, with forecasters warning of dangerous surf well beyond the immediate flood zones.
As the storm slowly departs the region, attention is turning to recovery: crews clearing downed trees, restoring power along the coastal corridor, assessing erosion damage to sea walls and beaches, and helping residents whose homes and businesses were inundated. Officials are expected to continue urging caution through at least Sunday night, as coastal flood waters typically peak with the highest astronomical tides of the day — a threat that forecasters said would persist even as the storm's winds and rain eased.
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