About 360,000 households without power as storms batter Northeast
A powerful weather system battered the tri-state area with heavy rain and strong winds over the weekend, as a fast-moving storm blanketed northern New England with snow and plunged some 360,000 households in the Northeast into blackouts.
At 6 a.m. ET Sunday, more than 197,000 households in Maine, 81,000 in New York state, and 73,000 in New Hampshire were without power, according to PowerOutage.us, which aggregates live outage data.
“Keep you and your family safe if you lose power,” Robert Buxton, director of the New Hampshire Department of Safety’s Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, said Saturday night. “Crews are out and working hard to restore outages as they happen. If you come across downed wires, stay away and call 911.”
He recommended staying updated with phone alerts or by radio broadcast, using flashlights rather than candles for emergency lighting, and refraining from using gas stoves or ovens for alternative heat.
By Sunday morning, footage showed the Northeast blanketed in snow, down trees in New York City, and flooded roads and highways across the region.
The New York City metro area through central and southern New Jersey received between 2 and 3 inches of rain on Saturday. Though the storm had cleared by Sunday morning, the National Weather Service warned of continued wind chills in the teens and 20s.
A swath of the Northeast received heavy snowfall. As of Saturday, 8:30 p.m. ET, 24.5 inches of snow had fallen on Landgrove, Vermont, 20.5 in both Corinth, New York, and Claremont, New Hampshire, and 13.5 in Sweden, Maine, according to the National Weather Service.
By 2 p.m. ET on Saturday, Philadelphia had recorded 3.06 inches of rainfall, making this the wettest March since the state began keeping records in 1872.
Weather conditions caused major delays across New York City airports. Arrivals at John F. Kennedy International Airport were delayed an average of three hours as of 5 p.m. EDT, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. La Guardia Airport also experienced delays in arrival and departure flights.
Elsewhere, a fast-moving storm dumped snow across parts of northern New England. More than 30 million people from the northern Rockies and Upper Midwest through the central Great Lakes into New England were under winter alerts.
Light to moderate snow was expected for the Upper Midwest to the Great Lakes, where 2 to 7 inches was forecast.
The Maine Emergency Management Agency said the storm could bring the largest snowfall of the season and urged motorists to use caution.
“Mixed precipitation in some areas will make for especially hazardous travel conditions,” the agency said in a post on X. “Check your local forecast for conditions.”
In the Twin Cities area, the storm was predicted to bring more than 12 inches. Combined with a 2.9-inch accumulation from a “teaser” snowstorm Thursday night and Friday morning, snow totals were forecast to exceed the 14.3 inches that had fallen in the previous season.
Meanwhile, a storm behind it swept down the California coast as it moved east, bringing 0.5-1 inches of rain to the Bay Area. More than 6 inches of snow was also recorded in the Sierra Nevada range, with the Heavenly Lake Tahoe resort reporting 10 inches of fresh powder Saturday morning.
In Oxnard, a city along the coast northwest of Los Angeles, a reading of 0.59 inches of rain set a modern record for this date. Same for Lancaster, a high desert city in Los Angeles County, which measured 0.53 inches of rain.
Orange and San Diego counties posted mostly smaller fractions of an inch of rain by the time the bulk of the storm passed Saturday evening.
The same front was moving east and forecast to bring “heavy snow and strong winds, and possible blizzard conditions to the Northern Plains and Upper Midwest through Tuesday morning,” the National Weather Service said in a forecast discussion.
From Kansas to Texas, the storm could churn up scattered severe thunderstorms on Sunday, the weather service said.
