Almost 100,000 homes still without power in New York City after storm Isaias hits East Coast
Storm Isaias reportedly left 98,000 households were still without power in New York City on Wednesday morning after the storm swept the East Coast.
The storm, which had so far caused life-threatening flash floods and high winds throughout Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, hit the region on Tuesday.
Isaias left at least 257,000 homes without power in New York City alone on Tuesday, according to Con Edison, the company which provides electricity to the city.
As of Wednesday morning Con Edison tallied 5,240 outages affecting 98,215 customers in the five boroughs in New York City as of around 8.30am, The New York Post reported.
Across the region, around 1.4 million households in New Jersey, 578,000 households in New York, and 395,000 households in Connecticut suffered outages as the storm touched down, according to The Wall Street Journal.
“Some of these outages may last for a few days due to the severity of the storm,” New Jersey governor Phil Murphy tweeted on Tuesday afternoon.
“We are working closely with the utilities to restore power as quickly and safely as possible.”
Con Edison said that the total outage caused by the storm in New York City was the second-largest in the company’s history.
The outage numbers were surpassed only by the 1.1 million caused by Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 and a Nor’easter that struck the next week.
By Tuesday afternoon, Isaias was moving 40 mph (63 kph) with maximum sustained winds of 65 mph (104 kph) as storm warnings remained in effect.
New York City reached wind speeds of as high as 80 mph (128 kph) the same day, forcing the city to suspend its Staten Island ferry and above-ground subway lines.
All 911 phone lines were down in Orange County as of Wednesday morning, according to a tweet by Mount Hope Police.
Isaias left behind a tangled mess of tree branches and power lines downed by strong winds and, in some cases, tornadoes.
At least four people in the US died after the system moved along the eastern coast, battering trees and power lines, brewing tornadoes and flooding homes after dumping heavy rains across several states.
A 60-year-old man was killed in New York City after a tree was uprooted and crushed his van, according to the New York Police Department.
A woman in Mechanicsville, Maryland was also killed after a tree crashed into her car, St Mary’s County sheriff’s office reported.
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