Slow-moving Tropical Depression Henri was still lingering over the northeast Monday morning, threatening more flooding in the already-rain-soaked region.
More than 64,000 customers were still without power Monday morning, with the majority in Rhode Island, though Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York also still had outages.
After making made landfall as a tropical storm on the coast of Rhode Island Sunday afternoon, Henri is expected to weaken, but not before dropping up to 3 inches more of rain between southeast New York and Rhode Island, which already got several inches of rain over the weekend. Flash flood warnings were in effect in the area, including Long Island, according to the National Hurricane Center.
Rhode Island and Connecticut residents were warned to stay home through at least Monday morning.
President Joe Biden on Sunday promised to provide federal help to the residents of affected states. The president declared disasters in much of the region.
Some of the worst rain had arrived well before the storm’s center. Some communities in central New Jersey were inundated with as much as 8 inches of rain by midday Sunday.
In Newark, at least 86 people were rescued from flooded vehicles related to the tropical storm by Sunday afternoon, according to the city’s department of public safety.
In Helmetta, New Jersey, some 200 residents fled for higher ground, taking refuge in hotels or with friends and family, as flood waters inundated their homes.
Mayor Chris Slavicek said Monday that several homes had been damaged and more would likely be discovered throughout the day as cleanup crews were out in “full force.”
Meanwhile, in New York, the National Weather Service recorded what could be the wettest hour ever in Central Park, with 1.94 inches of torrential rainfall pelting the park between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. Saturday.
Earlier in the evening, the 60,000 people attending a “We Love NYC: The Homecoming Concert” at the park were forced to disperse because of heavy rainfall and lightning. The concert had been intended to celebrate the city’s recovery from the coronavirus.
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Marshall Shepherd, director of the atmospheric sciences program at the University of Georgia and former president of the American Meteorological Society, said Henri was reminiscent in some ways of Hurricane Harvey, a slow-moving storm that decimated the Houston area in 2017.
But Robert Welch, a podcaster, just hoped it would not be comparable to Tropical Storm Irene, which spared a well-warned New York in August 2011 only to become the biggest natural disaster in Vermont since an epic 1927 flood.
“I remember Irene and media outlets outside Vermont brushing it aside as if no big deal while it hit Vermont,” Welch tweeted Sunday. “I’ll relax when I see it at sea on radar.”
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
