More flooding expected as nor’easter moves out to sea

Associated Press

BOSTON

People along the Northeast coast braced for more flooding during high tides Saturday even as the powerful storm that inundated roads, snapped trees and knocked out power to more than 2 million homes and businesses moved hundreds of miles out to sea.

Areas from Maryland to Maine remained under flood warnings. Officials in eastern Massachusetts, where dozens of people were rescued from high waters overnight, warned of another round of flooding during high tides expected around noon.

As Saturday’s midday high tide arrived, heavy surf crashed into the cliffs along Cape Cod Bay in Bourne, Mass., drawing dozens of onlookers to watch churning brown waves take big bites out of the eroding coastline.

“We’ve been here a long time and we’ve never seen it as bad as this,” said Alex Barmashi, who lives in the hard-hit village of Sagamore Beach.

Up the coast in Scituate, Mass., Becky Smith watched as ocean waters started to fill up a nearby marina’s parking lot from her vantage point at the Barker Tavern, a restaurant overlooking the harbor.

“It looks like a war zone,” she said, describing the scene in the coastal town near Boston where powerful waves dumped sand and rubble on roads and winds uprooted massive trees. “It’s a lot of debris, big rocks and pieces of wood littering the streets.”

Residents in other coastal areas, meanwhile, bailed out basements and surveyed the damage while waiting for power to be restored, a process that power companies warned could take days in parts. More than 2 million homes and businesses remained without power Saturday.

“The rest of today will be clean up,” said Miles Grant, after he secured a generator to run a pump to remove standing water from his basement in Marion, Mass. “Usually when you think of bad weather in New England, you think of snow. But it’s been all wind and coastal flooding.”

Authorities on Saturday reported two more deaths from the storm, bringing the total to at least seven in the Northeast. A 25-year-old man in Connecticut and a 57-year-old Pennsylvania man were killed when trees fell on their cars Friday.

The other five people killed included two children. A man and a 6-year-old boy were killed in different parts of Virginia, while an 11-year-old boy in New York state and a man in Rhode Island, both died. A 77-year-old woman died after being struck by a branch outside her home near Baltimore.