Heavy rain and snow lashed the northeastern United States on Tuesday, causing power outages and hundreds of flight cancellations, while the West Coast also endured a storm and an exceptionally wet winter.
“Double storm! One on each coast,” warned the North American Weather Service (NWS, for its acronym in English) in reference to “threats of large-scale flooding in California,” and “the danger, if not the Impossibility of traveling to the northeast due to snowfall and flooding on the coast”.
In the northeast, “the most significant impacts are expected until early Tuesday to Wednesday” with “heavy snow” and “strong winds,” the NWS stressed.
Police in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, where up to 28 inches of snow fell, advised drivers to stay off the road.
Quite rare in the United States, this bicoastal dual phenomenon follows several extreme weather events, including a series of January storms in California that killed 20 people, and heavy snowfall in late December in and around Buffalo. , in upstate New York, where at least 39 people died.
While it’s hard to make a direct link to climate change, scientists regularly explain that global warming increases the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
Bad weather and strong winds caused power outages in the Northeast on Tuesday, affecting more than 240,000 homes, according to the specialized website poweroutage.us.
At least several hundred flights were delayed or cancelled, disruptions that particularly affected New York’s LaGuardia airport or Boston airport, according to the FlightAware website.
In Syracuse, near the Canadian border, passengers had to be removed from a plane that had skidded off its runway, in an incident the airport said left no one injured.
Schools have been closed in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where dozens of local elections scheduled for Tuesday have also been postponed.
In California, which is facing a particularly harsh winter, torrential rains could cause “extensive flooding” across much of the coast and central valley, as well as the southern Sierra Nevada foothills, the NWS warned.
Meteorologists also warned of a high risk of avalanches, risks that this US state, the most populous in the country with 39 million inhabitants, has already faced in recent weeks.
Source: TSF
