September Nor’easter Batters East Coast, Unleashing Widespread Flooding and Power Outages
A rare September nor’easter is really clobbering the East Coast this weekend, bringing gnarly coastal flooding, heavy rain, and high winds from the mid-Atlantic all the way up to Maine. And folks are feeling it.
Take Talia Manno in Atlantic City, New Jersey. She woke up Saturday morning to waves practically on her doorstep. “It got up to my fifth step,” Manno told reporters. “I was really freaking out.” She’s lived there her whole life, and the last time she saw water that high was during Hurricane Sandy. “Even if you live here and you see high tide and flooding, that was really scary and it happened so fast,” she said.
It’s a mess out there. By Saturday evening, nearly 80,000 people were without power across New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, according to PowerOutage.com. The National Weather Service expects the storm to keep pounding the Jersey Shore, New York City, and Eastern Massachusetts right into Sunday.
Unseasonal Fury
Social media videos from Saturday showed New Jersey streets under water, and colossal waves smashing the coast. People were even kayaking in New York City streets. Both New Jersey and New York declared states of emergency in counties, including the Big Apple.
Francis Tarasiewicz, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Massachusetts, said coastal wind gusts could hit 60 miles per hour this weekend. And get this: nor’easters usually hit between October and May, not in September. This one’s also sticking around longer than usual. “Many nor’easters affect the area over the course of about a day,” he explained. “It’s a quick punch of strong winds, in many cases, heavy snow or rain.” But, with this storm, “we’re looking at about a 48-hour period of winds greater than 35 to 40 miles per hour across the area.”
Travel? Forget about it. FlightAware data shows over 1,000 flights got canceled Saturday, with thousands more delayed. Ferry services on Cape Cod and in Rhode Island are out. Amtrak even canceled several trains because of the weather and downed wires.
Jessica Lisboa was on a Bermuda-bound cruise off New York. She came prepared with green apples, ginger ale, and an acupressure anti-nausea bracelet. “Let me not sugarcoat it. Was it wild? Yeah, sure. It was a little wild,” she admitted. “It felt honestly like a roller coaster.” Still, she thought it was worth the adventure.
This nor’easter also wiped out a bunch of weekend events. Oceans Calling, a big music festival in Maryland, got canceled Friday. An AC/DC concert in New Jersey? Rescheduled. And the Boston Red Sox moved their game against the Chicago Cubs.
Olga Ostrovetsky had planned a small outdoor wedding in Wallkill, New York, for September, picturing a lovely fall day. Instead? “It’s very, very windy,” she said while getting ready. But she’s finding the bright side. “It’s kind of fitting, to be honest, because my fiancé and I met and it was a torrential downpour,” she mused. “We met on a day like this, and we’re also getting married on a day like this.”
As for Talia Manno in Atlantic City, she’s spending Saturday night away from the coast with family. After this storm, she’s not sure how much longer she’ll stay put. “As the years pass, it seems like it’s just getting more and more flooding,” she said. “It’s crazy.”