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A powerful late-September storm continued to batter the northeastern United States on Sunday, delivering a second consecutive day of coastal flooding, destructive winds and mass power outages across a region still recovering from the scars of earlier hurricanes.
The system, a slow-moving nor'easter, has been pummelling the shoreline since Friday. On Sunday, tidal surges swamped low-lying neighbourhoods in New Jersey, while wind gusts toppled trees on New York's Long Island, crushing homes and snapping utility poles that help carry electricity to tens of thousands of households. In New York City, streets in the Howard Beach neighbourhood of Queens were inundated, turning intersections into rivers of rainwater and debris.
The storm has already claimed a life. A New York City housing authority worker was killed when a tree fell on Saturday, according to officials. The fatality underscores a persistent hazard of coastal storms in the Northeast: even as floodwaters retreat and winds ease, falling trees and unstable structures remain a danger to residents and first responders long after the worst of the weather has passed.
Forecasters expected the storm to linger through Sunday, dragging heavy rain, strong winds and dangerous surf as far north as New England. The slow speed of the system is itself part of the problem. A storm that stalls near the coast keeps powerful onshore winds and elevated seas in place, exposing the same low-lying shoreline to successive high-tide cycles and preventing any meaningful recovery between rounds of flooding.
The volume of rain has been extraordinary in places. More than 10cm (4 inches) has fallen in some spots in New Jersey since Friday, and when those totals are combined with a surging ocean, the resulting flood depths have reached levels not seen for close to a decade in communities that are accustomed to regular high water. Residents in some areas said the flooding recalled the worst of past nor'easters, delivering water into homes and businesses long before anyone had finished mopping out the previous inundation.
For many residents, the storm evoked memories of Hurricane Sandy, the devastating 2012 superstorm that left behind more than $60bn in damage across the eastern United States. Officials and forecasters have stressed that this event's impact is nowhere near that scale. But the comparison is difficult to shake, as residents in Sea Bright, New Jersey, were photographed cleaning out a flooded pizza restaurant on Sunday while waves crashed nearby.
Along the coast, images of water hammering sea walls and thundering onto beaches have raised fresh concerns about coastal erosion. Beaches and barrier communities that took years to recover after earlier storms face a cumulative threat, as repeated surf removes sand rather than merely redistributing it. Videos and photographs from Rye, New Hampshire, on Sunday showed residents standing at the shoreline watching the ocean churn, an image that has become a visual measure of the storm's persistence.
Electricity losses have been extensive. More than 100,000 customers across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic were without power at various points on Sunday, according to the tracking site PowerOutage.us. The most widespread outages were concentrated in counties along the coast from New Jersey to Connecticut — precisely the corridor where wind-driven trees and flooded substations are hardest to reach and slowest to repair.
The storm's reach into the transportation network has been significant as well. Numerous flights were cancelled or delayed up and down the coast. By late Sunday morning, more than 250 flights had been cancelled at Boston Logan International Airport, where wind gusts reached 64km/hour (40 mph), according to the Massachusetts Port Authority. Airlines and airports along the Eastern seaboard continue to work through backlogs as crews, aircraft and passengers are dispersed.
Bob Oravec, a lead forecaster with the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland, said the storm was gradually weakening but warned that the danger was not entirely past. The heaviest of the remaining rainfall was expected on Sunday from northern New Jersey into southern New England, and Oravec said tidal flooding would persist through high-tide cycles on Sunday night. That means the greatest risk to residents is not over: walls of water can arrive hours after the rain stops.
Weather officials also flagged the possibility that this storm is a precursor rather than a one-off. Because an El Niño climate pattern is disrupting this year's weather, forecasters say the East Coast could see several storms this fall. El Niño typically shifts storm tracks and reshapes the jet stream, allowing more potent storms to take a more southerly, coastal-blocking path — the kind of configuration that favours slow-moving, high-impact nor'easters.
For emergency managers, the combination is a familiar but exhausting equation: repeated high tides, saturated ground, weakened dunes and seawalls, and storms arriving in quick succession. Residents in flood-prone neighbourhoods are advised to stay clear of tidal surge zones through Sunday night, heed local evacuation guidance, and treat the slow-moving nature of the system as a reason for patience rather than complacency. The storm, in short, is weakening — but the water, like the power, may take far longer to come back.
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