Croton-On-Hudson, N.Y. – People were evacuated from flooded homes today and refrigerators and trucks floated downstream as a fierce nor’easter drenched the Northeast with record rainfall, knocking out power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses.
Suburbs north of New York City were among the hardest hit. In Mamaroneck, resident Nicholas Staropoli said a truck near his home “actually floated up on the riverbank.” Rain was still falling this morning in the New York area and New England after it began early Sunday along the East Coast from Florida to New England.
Mamaroneck police and firefighters spent the night rescuing residents from about 60 to 70 homes, said Town Administrator Stephen Altieri. More than two dozen National Guard members used trucks and Humvees to help evacuate low-lying sections of the town.
The state had activated 3,200 Guard members.
“There was debris flowing down the river like you wouldn’t believe – refrigerators, I mean, you name it, it was going down the river,” homeowner John Vitro said of the Mamaroneck River.
The combination of heavy rain and unusually high tide rolling up the Hudson River pushed the Croton River out of its banks in Croton-on-Hudson, in northern Westchester County. Major commuter highways in the county were closed by water.
The rain totaled 7.81 inches in Central Park from early Sunday this morning, the National Weather Service said. The previous record in the park for April 15 was just 1.8 inches, set in 1906.
Snow fell in inland areas, including 17 inches in Vermont, with flakes still falling today across sections of Pennsylvania, upstate New York and Maine.
Nearly a half-million homes and businesses had lost power from North Carolina to Maine.
“We have incredible amounts of damage,” said Steve Costello, a spokesman for Central Vermont Public Service, describing power lines brought down by the heavy snow. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” In Westchester County, north of New York City, all public schools were closed today. Cars were stalled in water on numerous roads and several major highways were closed at times by flooding.
New Jersey also had school closings, highways blocked by water and dozens of residents being evacuated from homes, authorities said.
Hundreds of people had been evacuated from their homes in southern West Virginia as crews worked to pump water from a private lake near Hamlin to keep an unstable earthen dam from collapsing.
If the dam breaks, millions of gallons of water could pour into Hamlin, Mayor Brian Barrett said today. “We’re being told it could be eight or nine feet of water,” Barrett told the Herald-Dispatch of Huntington.
Fierce wind toppled trees onto a northern New Hampshire highway as Bob Eastman was driving through this morning. “It was a wonder it didn’t blow you off the road,” he said.
Eastman said highways crew used chain saws and snowplows to remove the fallen trees.
Coastal residents were urged to evacuate in parts of Maine, and a nursing home in Portland was evacuated as a precaution, state officials said. In southeastern New Hampshire, parts of downtown Newmarket were evacuated because of flooding.
Flights were delayed today at the New York area’s three major airports, where airlines canceled some 600 flights Sunday as wind gusted to 48 mph, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Dozens more flights were canceled in Philadelphia, Boston and elsewhere in New England.
Flooding caused cancellations and delays for Amtrak passengers between Washington and Boston.
In Union City, N.J., a large section of a 4-foot-thick, 50-foot-high stone wall collapsed onto a busy road during the night, and rescue workers used heavy machinery and dogs today to see if any cars had been buried. “There could be, and that’s the assumption we have to operate under,” said David Curtis, deputy chief of North Hudson Regional Fire and Rescue.
An apartment building atop the wall was evacuated.
The storm gave about 20,000 runners in today’s Boston Marathon something to worry about besides Heartbreak Hill as the course was doused with several inches of rain driven by wind gusting to more than 30 mph.
“When you live in the Northeast, you’ve got to respect this kind of weather,” said marathoner Rob Comitz, 31, from Harleysville, Pa.
In Maine, however, Portland called off its Patriot’s Day 5-Miler race for the first time in 78 years, because police were too busy with flooding, downed trees and power outage to secure the race route.
One person was killed by a tornado in South Carolina, and two died in car accidents – one in upstate New York and one in Connecticut. The storm rattled the Gulf states Friday and Saturday with violent thunderstorms after taking Texas with at least two tornadoes, and it was blamed for five deaths in Texas and Kansas.
