Final Days Of October Seem To Inspire Historic Vermont/Northeast Storms

Damage from this week's nor'easter in New England. Photo 
via Twitter from Michael Farragamo

The second of two major storms have just hit the East Coast within one week.  

The first a nor'easter with a peak wind gust of 94 mph blasted Massachusetts Tuesday and Wednesday.  Power is still out to some homes after the winds tore down innumerable trees and power lines. 

A second storm yesterday brought winds of up the 60 mph on the Jersey Shore and caused some damaging coastal flooding through the Mid-Atlantic states.  The flooding was among the worst on record, with some areas reporting among the top five storm surges in history 

Neither storm is having much of an effect on Vermont. The one that blasted the Mid-Atlantic States yesterday is forecast to dump an inch or more of rain on the Green Mountain State by tomorrow afternoon. Winds could gust over 40 mph in some areas, especially near the western slopes of the Green Mountains in this storm. 

So we get a fairly notable storm, but nothing extreme for Vermont. There might be a bit of minor flooding, and some isolated tree and power line damage. Luckily, this storm won't be as bad as it was further south yesterday.

This is history repeating itself, though.  There's something about the days around Halloween in the northeast that scare up some intense, historic storms. There's  been a ton of them.  Several of these storms cost hundreds of millions, sometimes billions of dollars, not to mention lost lives.

Here's a bit of a trip down memory lane with these (mostly) recent October storms. 

The Perfect Storm, October 31-November 2, 1991:  This of course is the storm made famous by the book and movie about the sinking of the fishing boat Andrea Gail during the raging storm that resulted in five deaths on the boat, part of a total storm death toll of 13.  

A tropical storm teamed up with a another non-tropical system to produce an immense storm offshore of New England. The storm produced winds of 75 mph on the coast, but worse, caused a devastating storm surge that caused upwards of $200 million in damage.

Halloween Snowstorm, October 29-31, 2011

Damage from a massive late October, 2011 snowstorm in
Glastonbury Ct. Photo by Jessica Hill/AP

Much like this year, autumn that year was warm in New England and other parts of the Northeast.  That meant that leaves stayed on the trees late into the season.  

Then a strong nor'easter got going off the coast, and pulled down some very chilly air from Canada. The result was a stripe of very heavy snow from northeastern Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey up through central and southern New England.

Northern New Jersey, southern New York, southern Vermont and New Hampshire and much of Massachusetts and Connecticut received 10 to 20 inches of wet, heavy snow. Peru, Massachusetts was smothered beneath 32 inches of snow. 

This all fell on those trees, the weight collecting on all those leaves still up there, and many of those trees collapsed under the burden. Over one million people in Connecticut alone lost electricity. Some people in the entire snow zone were without power for a week or more. 

Superstorm Sandy October 28-30, 2012

The sprawling storm, consisting of a hurricane making a transition to a non-tropical system took a weird path and made a left hand hook from the Atlantic into New Jersey on October 29, 2012.  It was one of the worst storms in American history. 

Superstorm Sandy killed 75 Americans, with an additional 72 deaths in the Caribbean earlier when Sandy was a hurricane. The storm destroyed 650,000 homes, and caused $70.2 billion in damage, mostly in New Jersey and New York.

Here in Vermont, we suffered just a glancing blow from Sandy, with power outages mostly across southern parts of the state.

Workers patch up a Milton, Vermont roof after a severe 
windstorm in October, 2017.

Bomb Cyclone, October 29-30, 2017

Another nor'easter developed explosively along the coast, causing widespread damage in and around New England.  

As we've seen in the past week, nor'easters often cause strong winds along the coast. If conditions are just right, these winds come way inland. And they did in this case.

Here in Vermont, strong, damaging winds are common right along the west slopes of the Green Mountains. This time, these downslope winds extended all the way to Lake Champlain, with destructive results. 

More than 150,000 Vermonters, one fourth the state's population, lost electricity.  Hundreds of Vermont homes suffered damage like lost shingles, sections of roofs gone, siding torn off or falling trees crashing into them. Winds gusted to 131 mph atop Mount Mansfield, 78 mph in Wells, Vermont and 63 mph in Burlington.

The storm also caused wind damage throughout New England, and destructive flooding in parts of New Hampshire and Maine.

Intense Vermont Flooding, Wind, October 31-November 1 2019

This tree uprooted and destroyed an SUV in our
St Albans, Vermont yard on November 1, 2019.

This storm, for a change, was not a nor'easter but still caused enormous havoc in Vermont. Parts of Vermont were declared disaster areas due to the worst flooding the state had seen since the devastating Tropical Storm Irene floods of 2011. 

Sections of two rivers in northern Vermont reached record crests. Numerous roads were washed out and dozens of homes and businesses were severely damaged by the flooding. 

Bridge replacement work continues to this day in Williston due to this storm.

The storm packed a one-two punch, first with the severe flooding and second with damaging winds. A number of properties in Vermont that escaped the flooding were damaged by the wind. This included my own place, where one of our vehicles was destroyed by a falling tree and our house suffered minor damage.