Rain, Power Cuts, Travel Chaos Plague New York: Weather Watch

Record rain falling on melting snow and high winds have caused flooding, power outages and grounded flights across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, including New York, in the US.

Through midnight, Manhattan’s Central Park received 1.73 inches (4.4 centimeters) of rain, a record for the date, while John F. Kennedy and LaGuardia Airports also set new highs for Jan. 9, the weather service said.

Flood warnings and watches are up from Maine to North Carolina as the rain continues to pound. Across 11 states from Michigan to Florida, nearly 543,000 customers were without electricity, with New York and Pennsylvania suffering the most outages, according to PowerOutage.us. Meanwhile the winds and rain have also played havoc with air travel, grounding 642 flights around the US early Wednesday, with LaGuardia topping the list with 82 as of 6:30 a.m., said FlightAware, an airline tracking company.

The Bronx River has risen about three feet from Tuesday afternoon to hovering just below major flood stage as of 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, the National Weather Service said. The Saddle River in Lodi, New Jersey has risen six feet from Tuesday afternoon to hit major flood stage and the Ramapo River in Mahwah, New Jersey rose more than four feet overnight.

The storm is the second since last weekend and will be followed by still another at the end of the week, which also will bring flooding rains to the East Coast. Temperatures will soar to a high of 60F (15.6 C) in Manhattan on Saturday before crashing down to freezing overnight as the storm exits, the weather service said. Across the central US, readings are forecast to fall to the single digits and even below 0 in many places.

The storm tracks are typical of a winter dominated by El Niño in the Pacific, forecasters said. However it the individual systems are tightly packed together so they are coming one right after the other.

Top photo: A snow covered stop sign during a storm in Hudson, New York, US, on Sunday, Jan. 7, 2024. Hundreds of flights have been grounded across the US from a pair of winter storms that left more than a foot of snow in New York’s Hudson Valley and sparked blizzard warnings across the Great Plains.