A slow-moving nor’easter battered the northeastern United States for a second day Sunday, flooding low-lying neighborhoods in New Jersey and New York City, toppling trees across Long Island and cutting power to more than 100,000 customers at points during the day, according to outage tracking data.
Tidal surges swamped streets along the New Jersey shoreline, including the borough of Sea Bright, where people spent the day cleaning out a flooded pizza restaurant, while in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, floodwater covered roads. Wind gusts on Long Island brought down utility poles and damaged homes. The worst of the remaining rainfall was forecast to fall Sunday from northern New Jersey into southern New England, with heavy rain, strong winds and dangerous surf expected to persist all the way north to New England’s coast.
The storm has already claimed at least one life. A New York City housing authority worker was killed Saturday when a tree fell during the storm.
Rainfall totals help explain the severity. More than 10 centimeters, or 4 inches, of rain fell in some parts of New Jersey between Friday and Sunday, and that rain arrived while a surging ocean was pushing water back up through drainage systems and over shorelines. The combination produced flooding that some residents, in communities accustomed to periodic high water, said they had not seen in close to a decade. ATN, New York has gathered from utility and airport figures that the disruption spread well beyond the waterline: the most widespread outages struck counties along the coast from New Jersey to Connecticut, while the Massachusetts Port Authority reported more than 250 flight cancellations at Boston Logan International Airport by late Sunday morning, with wind gusts there reaching 64 kilometers per hour, or 40 mph. Numerous other flights up and down the coast were delayed or scrubbed.
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Bob Oravec, a lead forecaster with the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland, said the storm was gradually weakening but that tidal flooding would continue through Sunday night’s high-tide cycles, meaning coastal communities faced another round of rising water even after the heaviest rain moved out.
Images of waves slamming into sea walls and onto beaches have raised concerns about coastal erosion. The storm has revived memories of Hurricane Sandy, which caused more than $60 billion in damage across the eastern United States in 2012. This storm’s impact has been nowhere near that scale.
A nor’easter takes its name from the direction of the winds that drive it: it is a large low-pressure system that tracks along the Atlantic coast, pulling strong northeasterly winds and moisture onto shore. Unlike a hurricane, it can form outside the summer and early fall storm season, and it often lingers for days, prolonging exposure to high tides. That lingering quality is what makes them punishing for coastal flood zones, since several consecutive high-tide cycles can push water higher on each pass while soaked ground and full storm drains have nowhere to send additional rain.
The season ahead adds to the concern: the storm could be the first of several to strike the East Coast this fall, because of an El Nino climate pattern that is disrupting this year’s weather. Past nor’easters have delivered substantial disruption to the same corridor: a December 2023 storm canceled more than 400 Northeast flights and cut power to more than 600,000 customers, the October 2017 storm left more than 1.3 million customers without power, and an October 2021 storm knocked out electricity to more than 600,000, according to records compiled after those events.
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The distinction between rain-driven and tide-driven flooding matters for the days ahead. Rainfall can be forecast by the hour and tends to recede once the front passes, but coastal flooding follows the calendar of the tides and the direction of the wind. When onshore winds hold a large volume of water against the coast, each high tide arrives higher than astronomical predictions alone would suggest, and storm drains that empty into tidal waterways cannot release the rain that has already fallen. That is why the weather service’s warning centers on the overnight high-tide cycles rather than on rainfall alone, and why bayside neighborhoods such as Howard Beach can take on water even after the rain eases.
The National Weather Service said tidal flooding was expected to continue through Sunday night’s high tides.
