What to Know
- More than 200,000 customers across the Northeast are still without power after gusty storms that started on Halloween
- New York and Maine each had more than 70,000 still without service Saturday morning. Vermont had more than 28,000 without power.
- The storms killed at least two people, including a man in Tennessee and a man from Glenville, New York
More than 200,000 customers across the Northeast are still without power after gusty storms that started on Halloween toppled trees and power lines and caused flooding.
New York and Maine each had more than 70,000 still without service Saturday morning. Vermont had more than 28,000 without power.
In some areas, it could be days before the power is back on.
The storms killed at least two people. A man in Tennessee who was injured when a tree fell on his van later died.
An 82-year-old Catholic priest died after driving his car into a heavily flooded area in Herkimer County; at some point, he left his vehicle to try to save himself and was washed away, authorities said Friday. His body was found hours later, in the New York town of Norway.
State police identified the man as Thomas Connery of Glenville, in Schenectady County. The Diocese of Albany says Connery was pastor of Immaculate Conception church in Glenville from 1990-2007 and had recently been assigned to a church in Herkimer.
The same fierce weather downed trees and wires across the region, leaving a young trick-or-treater with broken bones after it fell on her, pinning her underneath it, as she was out hunting for candy Thursday night.
The powerful storms triggered extreme weather threats for spots in the tri-state; a tornado warning was issued for parts of New Jersey shortly after midnight.
A National Weather Service statement advising people to take cover immediately said "a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado" was located just north of Trenton, moving northeast at 55 mph, with radar indicating rotation.
The borough of Madison was particularly hard-hit. Local authorities declared a disaster area effective at 1 a.m. Friday, authorizing whatever actions needed to be done, from road closures to outside assistance, to repair the damage. The state of emergency was still in place late Friday night.
Tens of thousands of people across the tri-state area remained without power Friday as raging wind gusts continued to plague the region for a second day. More than 20,000 people were still in the dark heading into the weekend. The late-night storms also caused major disruptions to Metro-North’s New Haven line, and extensive delays on some LIRR and NJ Transit lines as well.
