Eight dead, including two children, in fierce Nor'easter

The deaths, reported in Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Virginia, included two children.

An 11-year-old boy in Putnam Valley, New York, died after a large tree fell and crashed into a home, trapping the boy, the Putnam County Sheriff’s Department said.

A similar thing happened to a child in Chesterfield County, Virginia. The fire chief there said the child was in bed when a tree limb struck his home, fatally injuring him.

The adults who died in the storm were also killed by falling trees. In Massachusetts, it took more than four hours to extricate a man who was killed when a large tree fell on his car Friday during the height of the storm, Warren Borsari, the fire chief in Plympton, Massachusetts, said in a phone interview.

In Upper Merion Township, Pennsylvania, a 40-foot portion of a tree fell, crushing a car and killing a man inside it, the police chief there said.

The storm’s effects were felt as far south as Georgia and as far north as Maine. In Rhode Island, the winds were so severe that officials shut down the Newport Bridge. In New York City, most flights were grounded for a time Friday afternoon. In the Washington suburbs, downed trees were strewed across the streets.

Weather officials said more than 3 feet of snow blanketed some parts of New York state on Friday. Meteorologists confirmed Friday that the storm had become the second “bomb cyclone” in two months. (The name essentially derives from how quickly the barometric pressure falls.)

Coastal flooding damaged homes, closed roads and sent at least one car floating down a street; many areas of New England got 2 to 4 inches of rain.

In Quincy, Massachusetts, there were more than 100 rescues Friday as floodwaters drove people from their homes, the television station WBZ reported.

“As far as a coastal storm, this is the worst since the blizzard of ’78,” said Mayor Thomas Koch of Quincy. “Across the board this is the most damaging, and I’m very concerned about the infrastructure damage.”

Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts activated the National Guard, which mobilized 53 vehicles to help assist with evacuation and rescue efforts.

In Pennsylvania, Gov. Tom Wolf activated the National Guard on Friday to respond to the severe weather in the eastern part of the state, where Monroe County, in the Poconos about 80 miles northwest of New York City, was hit with nearly 2 feet of snow and wind gusts that knocked electrical wires and trees into the roads.

Cars and trucks spun out of control, shutting down Interstates 80 and 380, stranding hundreds of vehicles.

“It’s quite a unique storm with the amount of snow that came down that quickly,” Sean Brown, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, said in an interview Saturday.

“It has been nonstop,” Lorenzo Thompson, a manager at the Burger King in Gouldsboro, Pennsylvania, near Interstate 380, said in a phone interview Saturday morning. “I have not stopped taking orders since 7:30 a.m.”

One bus passenger, Angie Cortz, told WPXI on Saturday that she had been on the vehicle on Interstate 80 since Friday afternoon.

“They said that we were stuck due to accidents in the road,” she said. State troopers brought her and the other passengers some water as they continued to wait, she said.

Travel ground to a halt elsewhere as more than 3,000 flights were canceled and more than 3,500 others were delayed across the country Friday, many at coastal airports in the storm’s path, according to FlightAware. Amtrak suspended service along its Northeast Corridor.

The wind gusts made for turbulent trips for those who did fly.

A pilot on a plane headed to Washington Dulles International Airport sent a report to the Aviation Weather Center that painted an unsettling image of the flight.

The center, which is run by the National Weather Service, recounted the report in a tweet that said: “Pretty much everyone on the plane threw up. Pilots were on the verge of throwing up.”

As conditions began to improve in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, winds and coastal flooding remained a concern, Patrick Burke, a lead forecaster with the Weather Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said in a phone interview Saturday.

“One of the more pertinent threats that continues into the weekend is coastal flooding from Delaware on up all the way to Portland, Maine, and that would include Long Island and the New York City metro area,” he said.

The winds had slowed to 45 mph in some areas, a departure from reported winds on Friday that exceeded 65 mph, Burke said. The highest recorded gusts were 93 mph in Barnstable, Massachusetts.

On the heels of the nor’easter, a “modest-sized storm” will be making make its way across the Rockies and Central Plains, eventually arriving in the Northeast on Wednesday, Tony Fracasso, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service, said in a phone interview.

“It doesn’t look like it’s going to be as strong as the one that just went through yesterday,” he said, but it will bring at least a few inches of snow in the interior regions of the Northeast, and more rain to the coastal areas.

“There’s always the potential for something stronger than what we’re forecasting,” he added.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Heavy Downpour wreaks the country

Eight dead, including two children, in fierce Nor'easter

More than 2 million people in 17 states and Washington, D.C., were without power Friday night, the U.S. Energy Department said on its website. By about 9:30 p.m. Saturday, at least 1 million people were still dealing with power loss.

Enhance Your Pulse News Experience!

JOIN OUR PULSE COMMUNITY!