Nor'easter Floods New York and New Jersey Streets as Gusts Hit 81 MPH on Long Island
A falling tree killed a New York City Housing Authority worker in Brooklyn, tens of thousands lost power, and forecasters warned the storm would turn inland over New Jersey before it weakens this week.
A powerful nor'easter kept hammering the Northeast on Sunday, flooding coastal neighborhoods in New York and New Jersey so badly that residents paddled kayaks and canoes down streets past cars sitting half underwater.
The storm has killed at least one person. Officials in Brooklyn said Leighton Brown, a 56-year-old New York City Housing Authority employee, was struck and killed by a falling tree as winds tore through the borough. A swimmer reported missing off a Fire Island beach on Saturday turned up "alive and well," state police said, after he saw news coverage of the search and called them himself.
The winds reached hurricane strength in places. The National Weather Service recorded gusts approaching 81 mph at Montauk Point on Long Island and 74 mph in Surf City, New Jersey, on Saturday, speeds that match a low-end hurricane. More than 40,000 customers in New York and about 30,000 in Connecticut were without power Sunday morning, according to PowerOutage.us, though more than half of those outages had been restored by Sunday night. Across six states, nearly 80,000 customers were in the dark in the early hours of Sunday.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill have both declared states of emergency. "Conditions are extremely dangerous. Anyone who goes in or near the water this weekend is literally gambling with their life," Hochul said at a Saturday briefing, warning of waves as tall as 20 feet in some areas. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani told residents not to travel unless they had to.
Flooding hit Long Beach Island, Surf City and Rumson in New Jersey, where one resident filmed a fox swimming through floodwater. Forecasters expected the storm, which had been crawling up the coast offshore, to turn inland and pass directly over New Jersey before it breaks up this week. The weather service said more rain would fall across the mid-Atlantic and Northeast through Monday night, with gusts up to 50 mph possible from New Jersey to Long Island and rip currents threatening beaches as far south as the Carolinas.
CBS News meteorologist Andrew Kozak said the New York City area could get another 1 to 2 inches of rain Sunday night, while parts of New England, including Boston, could see 2 to 4 more inches and possibly as much as 7. He warned that another high tide cycle threatened Jamaica Bay, which borders Brooklyn and Queens, and lower New York Harbor.
The storm upended the weekend across the region. The New York Yankees called off their final regular-season game against the Baltimore Orioles. Hundreds of flights were canceled Sunday, including 171 at Boston's Logan Airport. The Global Citizen festival in Central Park was canceled for the first time in 14 years, and Ed Sheeran's weekend concerts near Boston were scrapped. At MetLife Stadium, wind sent portable toilets sliding across the parking lot during the Giants' game against the Titans.
The storm also dug into history. On Nantucket, pounding waves exposed timbers on the island's south shore that local journalists believe belong to the Warren Sawyer, a three-masted schooner that wrecked near Miacomet Beach in 1884 while carrying cotton from New Orleans to Boston.
