Significant storm wallops East Coast with flooding rains, high winds

A historically intense December coastal storm blasted the Northeast on Monday after unleashing heavy rainfall, coastal flooding and high winds from Florida to the Mid-Atlantic. More than 800,000 customers had no power Monday afternoon as many locations in eastern New England saw wind gusts between 60 and 70 mph — more resembling an early fall tropical storm than a December tempest.

Massachusetts and Maine were the two hardest hit states with a combined 640,000 customers in the dark. Boston’s Logan International Airport — where inbound fights were held for several hours because of high winds — clocked a gust at 68 mph; meanwhile gusts in Portland, Maine, hit 60 mph.

The National Weather Service logged hundreds of reports of flooding and high winds from northern Virginia to northern Maine on Monday. The flooding closed scores of roads while the winds toppled trees and wires.

The storm’s fierce winds and enormous waves also pushed ashore an ocean surge comparable to tropical storms and hurricanes from Florida’s west coast to southern New England. In many locations, the water level rose at least 2 to 4 feet above normal, inundating low-lying roadways.

Wet and wild storm sends D.C. rainfall into record territory

Charleston, S.C., saw its fourth-highest storm surge on record Sunday, as did Tampa, with water levels running four feet above normal.

Dale Morris, Charleston’s chief resilience officer, said in an interview on Monday that Sunday’s surge ranked only behind Hurricane Irma in 2017, an unnamed 1940 storm and Hurricane Hugo in 1989.

“We were a bit surprised,” said Morris, who noted that the massive surge exceeded the initial projections by the Weather Service.

Even so, he said, there wasn’t much more the city could have done to prevent the flooding that unfolded, which caused roughly 40 road closures and widespread damage that was still being tallied Monday afternoon. The city, he said, had employed mobile pumps beginning on Friday to try to ease flooding and had erected police barricades in some of the most affected spots.

Despite the fact that about 4 inches of rain fell in a matter of hours, Morris insisted that deluge was not responsible for the bulk of the disaster. On Charleston’s low-lying peninsula, there is virtually no defense now for tides above a certain threshold — a problem that is expected to grow only worse as seas continue to rise, absent serious adaptation measures such as a proposed sea wall.

“It wasn’t the rain that caused most of the problem, it was the surge,” Morris said of the main cause of the weekend’s flooding. “The Atlantic Ocean is in the city.”

A storm system brought heavy rain to the East Coast on Dec. 17. Charleston, S.C., was hit particularly hard with some roads left submerged under feet of water. (Video: The Washington Post)

Water levels also surged to about 4 feet above normal in Sandy Hook, N.J., and in the Battery in New York City on Monday morning. Providence, R.I., also recorded a surge of 4.5 feet at midday’s high tide.

The storm was also a prolific rain producer, dumping widespread totals of 2 to 4 inches from Florida to Maine. Rain accumulations reached the double digits between Charleston and Myrtle Beach, S.C., on Sunday, prompting a dire flash flood emergency issued for areas around Georgetown, S.C. Doppler radar estimated that between 12 and 16 inches fell, the majority within a six-hour window. Water rescues were ongoing as residents scrambled to higher ground.

Some of the thunderstorms that deluged the eastern Carolinas on Sunday were severe; one spawned a damaging tornado near Myrtle Beach. The twister touched down in Horry County, S.C., in the Socastee and Forestbrook areas. Eight power poles were snapped near Highway 707 in Socastee, and a shopping center was damaged. The National Weather Service office in Wilmington, N.C., rated it an EF-1 on the Fujita scale with 90-mph winds.

Rain ended in the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic by Monday morning, but downpours spread across the Northeast. Flash flood warnings were issued around New York City and stretched from around Scranton, Pa., to near Syracuse, N.Y. Another zone of significant flooding spanned from central New Hampshire into southern Maine.

Numerous rivers in the Northeast rose steeply, reaching moderate or even major flood stages.

The storm proved unusually intense for the time of year, setting records for low air pressures for December in numerous locations in the Southeast. (Generally, the lower the pressure, the stronger the storm.)

The storm as of late Monday afternoon

As of late Monday afternoon, the elongated center of the intense storm stretched across New England into Quebec while heading to the northeast.

While showers had ended in New York City and Providence, a hefty slug of rain still extended from roughly Albany to Caribou, Maine.

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Some of the heaviest rain was concentrated in the zone between Boston, Concord, N.H., and Augusta, Maine. Computer models project another 1 to 2 inches could fall in northern New Hampshire and interior Maine before the rain was to exit into Atlantic Canada late in the evening.

Even as rain ended, winds were predicted to continue to blow fiercely over coastal areas into the evening before easing some overnight.

Ocean surge and coastal flooding

Water levels reached measurements rarely seen outside of tropical systems on Sunday and Monday from Florida to Rhode Island. That’s a testament to the strength of the storm’s winds and onshore flow. Here’s a roundup of some of the maximum surges — or rises in water above normally dry land — recorded up the East Coast, organized south to north:

2.9 feet in Jacksonville, Fla.
4 feet in Charleston
2.5 feet in Fort Pulaski, Ga.
6.4 feet near Springmaid Pier, S.C., near Myrtle Beach
5.2 feet in Wilmington
2.5 feet in Hatteras, N.C.
2.3 feet in Chesapeake Channel, Va.
2.8 feet in D.C.
2.6 feet in Atlantic City
4.2 feet in Sandy Hook
4.5 feet in The Battery
2.6 feet in Bridgeport, Conn.
4.5 feet in Providence

Observed peak winds

The storm produced wind gusts of at least 50 mph in every coastal state from Florida to Maine.

In Florida, gusts reached around 50 mph in St. Petersburg and Tampa. Most of the coastal Carolinas recorded gusts between 40 and 50 mph, but Mitchell Field in Hatteras gusted to 59 mph; 62 mph in Cape Lookout, N.C.; and 67 mph in Florence, S.C.

To the north, Virginia Beach gusted to 48 mph, with widespread 40 mph to 60 mph gusts on the Delmarva Peninsula; Salisbury, Md., clocked a gust at 60 mph.

Into the Northeast and New England, the winds were even stronger. Here’s a recap of the strongest gusts:

New Jersey

52 mph in Atlantic City
52 mph in North Beach Haven
52 mph in Farmingdale

60 mph at the Brookhaven Airport, Long Island
54 mph at LaGuardia Airport
53 mph at Kennedy International Airport

New England

90 mph at Blue Hill Observatory southwest of Boston
82 mph in Rockport, Mass.
71 mph in Ellsworth, Me.
68 mph in Bangor, Me.
68 mph in Boston
67 mph at Norwood, Mass.
65 mph at Providence
63 mph in Hyannis, Mass.
62 mph in Nantucket, Mass.
59 mph at the Portland International Jetport in Maine
55 mph at Portsmouth, N.H.
49 mph at Bridgeport
47 mph at Hartford, Conn.

Rainfall totals

The storm, drawing moisture from the Atlantic, Caribbean and even the Pacific, unloaded exceptional rainfall over a large area. Numerous locations set calendar day and monthly rainfall records. Richmond, for example, tallied 2.74 inches of rain on Sunday alone — a December record. It narrowly beat the record of 2.73 inches that was set exactly a week earlier.

Here’s a roundup of selected rain totals from roughly south to north:

4.10 inches in Orlando
7.29 inches in Gainesville, Fla.
5.94 inches in Jacksonville
4.08 inches in Savannah, Ga.
4.02 inches in Charleston
9.74 inches in Georgetown
9.45 inches just northwest of Myrtle Beach
3.96 inches in Wilmington
3.94 inches in Raleigh, N.C.
3.50 inches in Virginia Beach
2.41 inches in D.C.
5.56 inches in Lewes, Del.
2.37 inches at LaGuardia Airport
4.17 inches in White Plains, N.Y.
2.83 inches in Hartford
4.8 inches in New Hartford, Conn.
2.01 inches in Boston
3.55 inches at Otter Lake in the New York Adirondacks
3.16 inches in Concord, N.H.
Up to 5 inches in the White Mountains of New Hampshire
2.26 inches in Burlington, Vt.
2.21 inches in Portland, Me.
2.24 inches in Augusta, Me.

Snow on the storm’s backside

While the back of the rainfall is winding down southwest to northeast, additional wraparound moisture on the back side of the storm could swing through the interior Mid-Atlantic into Tuesday. That’s the region of the storm where temperatures will be plummeting, making a band of snow showers and squalls likely.

Winter storm warnings are up for the high terrain of West Virginia, the extreme panhandle of Maryland and south-central Pennsylvania. That’s where upslope flow, or moisture being forced up the mountains and concentrated, will intensify to heavy snows in the Alleghenies. A general 3 to 7 inches are likely, with localized totals approaching 10 inches.

A few snow showers or flurries may sneak east in the pre-dawn hours on Tuesday, possibly affecting areas such as D.C., Baltimore or Philadelphia. That, however, would be a low-likelihood event.

Farther north and west, it’s already snowing in portions of Ohio, western Pennsylvania and western New York state. Moisture from the Great Lakes is helping to bolster those snows. Totals of up to 4 or 5 inches are possible.