Winter Storm in Fall Leaves Millions Without Power
Unusually early Nor’easter kills three and leaves the region battered.
| Posted Sunday, Oct. 30, 2011, at 12:32 PM
Photo by Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images.
A large winter storm that caused flight delays and surprised residents across the Northeast with heavy snow has left nearly 3 million customers without power and three people dead.
The storm, which dropped inches of snow, sleet, and rain throughout the region Saturday continued to deliver high winds and swelling seas on Sunday.
According to the New York Times, the strong weather system moving into the Northeast from the Atlantic Ocean downed power lines and broke records, eliciting winter warnings from officials earlier in the year than any in recent memory.
On Sunday, Connecticut had as many as 750,000 customers without power with no news of when it might return; Massachusetts reported 650,000 in the same boat. New Jersey had 271,000 without electricity, and New Hampshire 280,000.
In Washington, the White House’s Halloween party was interrupted briefly by the storm.
“We seem to have hit the jackpot,” National Weather Service meteorologist Charlie Foley told the Times. “It is unusual to have something like this before Halloween.”
With the earliest snowfall hitting the region for the first time in 140 years by some estimates, officials worried that the peculiar weather would be dangerous, due to an unusual combination of high winds, heavy snow, and trees that still had branches full of leaves.
Three people were reportedly killed due to the weather: An 84-year-old man in Pennsylvania died when a tree fell on his home, a 20-year-old Massachusetts man died of electrocution from a downed power line, and another person in Connecticut died in a car accident.
