Nor’easter power outages for thousands of customers have crews working into the night
By Eric Levenson, Monica Garrett and Amy Simonson, CNN
An April nor’easter brought heavy snow and gusty winds to the region Tuesday, keeping crews working to restore power busy in New York, Pennsylvania and New England.
The late-season storm left hundreds of thousands of people in the Northeast without power Tuesday, with the Empire State the most affected.
In the last 24 hours, the storm wreaked havoc over 11 New York counties, from the southern tier up to the north country, according to Gov. Kathy Hochul, who spoke at a briefing at the Broome County Emergency Operations Center.
“I do want to acknowledge that this was a very serious event, as I said, resulting in a dramatic amount of families, homes, businesses, schools, hospitals, at least temporarily displaced and dealing with the lack of power,” Hochul said.
As many as 350,000 homes were without power at some point during the storm, but 200,000 now had power restored, according to Hochul. Officials hope crews will restore everyone’s power in the next three days, she said.
Parts of western New York and Pennsylvania saw over a foot of snow, according to preliminary snowfall totals, including 18 inches in the town of Virgil, New York. Tree limbs throughout the state came down under the weight of snow and brought power lines down with them, Hochul said.
According to the website PowerOutage.US, about 130,000 homes and businesses in New York were still in the dark as of early Wednesday. There were more than 26,000 outages in Pennsylvania. Most affected customers in New England had their power restored by Tuesday evening as winds quieted down across the region.
Before then, battering high winds were highlighted by 67 mph gusts in Tuckerton, New Jersey, and 66 mph gusts in Cape May, New Jersey. New York’s JFK Airport recorded a gust of 47 mph overnight, while wind peaks ranged from 46 mph to 69 mph across parts of Suffolk County on Long Island, according to the National Weather Service.
A gale warning remains in place from Long Island northward along the New England coast. The weather service says during the warning, which is in effect until 8 a.m. ET, some areas will see seas as high as 15 feet.
“Strong winds will cause hazardous seas which could capsize or damage vessels and reduce visibility,” the weather service said.
A nor’easter is a term for a storm on the US East Coast in which powerful winds come from the northeast. This current storm’s mid-April arrival is rare, though not unheard of, experts said.
While the storms often impact coastal areas, this week’s nor’easter tracked much farther to the west, meaning precipitation in coastal cities arrived as rain while inland locations received heavy, wet snow.
Before arriving to the Northeast, the storm dropped heavy rain across the Carolinas and mid-Atlantic coast.
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CNN’s Jennifer Gray contributed to this report.
