New York – A nor’easter battered the East with strong wind and pouring rain Sunday, grounding hundreds of airline flights, downing power lines and threatening severe coastal flooding overnight.
The storm flooded people out of their homes in the middle of the night in West Virginia and trapped others. Some New Jersey shore residents evacuated, and officials in Connecticut urged some residents along the Long Island Sound to do the same. Inland areas from upstate New York to Maine faced a threat of heavy snow.
One person was killed by a tornado in South Carolina, and two died in car accidents – one in New York and one in Connecticut. The storm system already had been blamed for five deaths Friday in Kansas and Texas.
Storm warnings and watches were posted all along the East Coast, with coastal flood watches from Maryland to Maine through at least this morning.
More than 5 1/2 inches of rain fell in the New York region Sunday, shattering the record for the date of 1.8 inches set in 1906, according to the National Weather Service.
Weather-service meteorologist Gary Conte said Sunday night’s high tide was likely to bring coastal flooding to Long Island and parts of New York City.
About 5 inches fell in southwestern Connecticut, where flooding closed a section of Interstate 95 for about an hour. But Connecticut’s emergency management commissioner, James Thomas, was expecting most of the problems to come Sunday night with the high tide.
“We are prepared to deliver sandbags, assist with an evacuation or whatever we need to do,” Thomas said. “We’re kind of all sitting back, getting prepared and hoping it doesn’t get as bad as it has been in different parts of the country.”
At least three tornadoes touched down in South Carolina on Sunday. The most destructive cut a 14-mile-long, 300-yard- wide swath through Sumter County in the central part of the state, killing a woman who was thrown from her mobile home.
In New York, flooding stalled traffic along parkways and forced residents in at least one Queens neighborhood to paddle through streets in boats. Some coastal residents to the north in Westchester County were evacuated, and in the coastal Seagate section of Brooklyn, which suffered major flooding in a December 1992 nor’easter, residents placed sandbags in the streets.
