New York and New Jersey face flood threats as storm brings outages, travel chaos

A winter storm that drenched the US Northeast with record rainfall has left thousands of people without power, grounded hundreds of flights and put New York and New Jersey on high alert for flooding from swollen rivers as another system approaches.

“This was a far-reaching storm,” said Rob Carolan, owner of Hometown Forecast Services, which provides outlooks for Bloomberg Radio. “It was a potent, potent low” pressure system, he said.

Forecasters are already bracing for another storm that is expected to hit Manhattan late Friday, bringing more rain to inundated rivers and streams and elevating risks of dangerous flooding through the region. That would come days after Manhattan’s Central Park received 1.73 inches (4.4 centimeters) of rain on Tuesday — a record for the date. The US Weather Prediction Center is calling for an additional 1 to 2 inches to fall from Arkansas to Atlantic Canada though the weekend.

Even as rain from the latest storm tapers, flood warnings and watches remain in place from Maine to North Carolina. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who declared an emergency Monday ahead of the storm, warned Wednesday that rising waters in the Passaic River is increasing the risk of additional flooding throughout the region. Other New Jersey waterways — Saddle River and Ramapo River — swelled overnight, while New York’s Bronx River rose to just below major flood stage by early Wednesday morning, the National Weather Service said.

New rainfall records were also set at the region’s main airports — New York’s John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia, and Newark in New Jersey. The rain and winds played havoc with air travel across the region, grounding 652 flights as of early Wednesday with LaGuardia topping the list, according to airline tracking company FlightAware said.

More than 552,000 customers are without electricity across 12 states from Michigan to Florida, with New York and Pennsylvania suffering the most outages, according to PowerOutage.us.

This week’s storm tracks are typical of a winter dominated by El Niño in the Pacific, forecasters said. Temperatures are expected to soar to a high of 60F (15.6 C) in Manhattan on Saturday before crashing down to freezing overnight as the next storm exits, the weather service said. Across the central US, readings are expected to fall to the single digits and even below freezing in many places.