Matt's Weather Rapport: Unprecedented Rains In Northeast From Ex-Ida, Eight Dead In Floods, Tornadoes Too

Irvington, NJ last night.

This was nuts.

The amount of rain that poured down in parts of the Northeast from the remains of Hurricane Ida were truly off the charts.

Central Park in New York City got 3.1 inches of rain in an hour and 4.65 in two hours. That two hour rainfall is more than normally falls in a month.

Newark, New Jersey had 0.5 inches of rain in just SIX MINUTES. Newark also 3.24 inches in an hour and a storm total of 8.31 inches. At Brooklyn College, 1.23 inches fell in just 15 minutes.

Inevitably, the flash flooding was intense. The National Weather Service office in New York declared its first flash flood emergencies ever. The results of the flash flooding were tragic. According to the Associated Press:

"Police in New York City reported seven deaths, including a 50 year old man, a 48 year old woman and two year old boy who were found unconscious and unresponsive inside a home. They were pronounced dead at the scene, police said. One death was reported in New Jersey."

That was at 8 a.m. this morning. By 11 am., the death toll had risen to 22. They're still finding bodies in this mega disaster. Eight people died in Queens, New York. They drowned in their basement apartments.

This is beyond horrible.

Anyway, the AP continues:

"New York's FDR Drive, a major artery on the east side of Manhattan, and the Bronx River Parkway were under water by late Wednesday evening. Subway stations and tracks became so flooded that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority suspended all service. Videos posted online showed subway riders standing on seats in cars filled with water.

Other videos showed vehicles submerged up to their windows on major roadways in and around the city and garbage bobbing down the streets."

I also saw video on social media of waist deep water in Queens and in Park Slope, Brooklyn. There were some real "Day After Tomorrow" scenes in Manhattan last night, too.

The scope of the flooding was immense, with countless towns and cities across New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania and the New York City area submerged. It seems like there's videos of every city in New Jersey with deep water or white water rapids racing through their downtowns.

Newark International Airport closed in part because water surged into Terminal B. The Garden State Parkway was largely under water and closed last night.

Johnstown, Pennsylvania, known for enormous floods in 1889 and 1977, had a familiar scare as a dam upstream threatened to fail, prompting evacuations. This time, it wasn't nearly as bad as the 1889 disaster, thank goodness.

Some rivers in the Northeast are rising to major flood stage and could reach record crests. For instance, the National Weather Service says the Schuylkill River near Philadelphia will reach a record high crest. Already, homes and businesses along and near that river are deeply submerged.

Other rivers are still rising or just cresting this morning, causing additional destruction. MSNBC this morning was showing live footage of people being rescued from dozens of apartment buildings in Bridgeport, Pennsylvania. Parts of Hoboken, New Jersey, Philadelphia and other cities were still badly inundated as of late this morning.

The torrential thunderstorms also spun off tornadoes and set off tornado warnings. At least two substantial tornadoes touched down. One was in Annapolis, Maryland, which damaged or destroyed several homes and businesses.

Tornado damage in New Jersey

Another larger tornado struck southern New Jersey. It looked especially powerful on video. Many houses were severely damaged in this twister and a few were pretty much leveled.

The storms continued on into southern New England overnight, with damaging flash floods in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. A possible tornado might have touched down on Cape Cod.

We here in Vermont really dodged a bullet with this. If five or six inches of rain had fallen in a couple of hours on our steep mountain slopes, there would have been incredible rushes of water and debris that would have wiped out anything in their path. It would have almost made Irene in 2011 look like a picnic.

Instead, far southern Vermont got a decent slug of rain, but nothing nearly enough to cause real flooding. Bennington and Springfield each report about 1.5 inches of rain. Northern Vermont had nothing other than high clouds and a spectacular Wednesday evening sunset.

It's really remarkable, though, that we're only half way through hurricane season and New England has already suffered damage from four tropical systems this year - Elsa, Fred, Henri and Ida.

Yesterday's flooding and tornadoes cap a cataclysmic summer world wide, with big weather disasters and extreme temperatures and rainfall coming fast and furiously. This has all the fingerprints of climate change.

They've been saying right along that rainfall events will become more torrential and that has come to fruition. I noticed the governors and mayors from the Northeast who are dealing with the flooding keep bringing up climate change, so if nothing else these mega weather disasters are acting as a wakeup call.

"Global warming is upon us and it's going to get worse and worse and worse," New York Senator Chuck Schumer just said as I listen to the news while writing this.

Maybe too little too late?

Vermont lucked out again this time, but how long will it last? True, we've had our extremes this year, with damaging flash floods earlier this summer in southern parts of the state, along with bouts of record heat all year.

Vermont escaped the epic storm that unleashed the
extreme floods and tornadoes further south. But clouds
from the storm led to a spectacular but slightly
scary sunset last night over St Albans, Vermont.

These Vermont weather events and extremes this year have been more or less manageable, but when will we get our next big disaster? They seem to be hitting everywhere, and often.

It's only a matter of when, not if, something awful will hit Vermont again, as it did 10 years ago this week with Irene's floods

In the short term, at least, the weather is going to be benign. Nothing major will happen with the weather for the next week at least in Vermont. The next hurricane, Larry, is going to be a huge one, but current forecasts indicate it will recurve harmlessly out in the open Atlantic and not hit the United States.

But large wildfires continue to burn out west, and pockets of flash flooding will continue all week in the Southwest and a few sections of the Midwest.

Weather has always been a challenge for humans. With climate change, the challenge is so much greater, and getting more vexing. As if we needed more proof, last night in the Northeast added to the evidence.

Videos. The videos might not automatically open on mobile devices, so click on the hyperlinks that introduce each to see them. Otherwise, click on the video that click the YouTube logo for better viewing.

A newscast from New Jersey hints at the scope: