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:

Stranded on a bus in New York City with water pouring into vehicle:

Water gushing into a subway, surging into Newark, New Jersey airport, and flooding road:

Large tornado in New Jersey. Looks like at least EF-3 damage to me:

Hurricane Ida: It Ain't Over Yet

Galliano, Louisiana in a shambles after Hurricane Ida.
Photo from the U.S. Coast Guard

 UPDATE 4:30 PM TUESDAY

NOAA's Weather Prediction Center has upgraded the flash flood risk to "High" in parts of the Northeast for tomorrow.

That's a rare highest level alert, especially for this part of the nation.  In other words, this area is in SERIOUS trouble from flooding due to former Hurricane Ida.

The "high" ranking means severe, widespread flash flooding is expected. Areas that normally don't flood could well do so.

The area of highest risk goes from the northeastern corner of West Virginia, through southern and parts of eastern Pennsylvania, the New York City metro area and Connecticut.

The remains of Ida are expected to hook up with a stalled weather front to dump at least four to eight inches of rain on this area in a day or less.  There could be a few pockets that get more than that, even. Eight inches of rain is twice what normally falls in a month in this area.

The impacts of this impending flood will almost certainly be worse than what happened with Henri recently. Of course, the ground is still sopping wet from that storm, which doesn't help.

In Vermont, there's a slight risk of flooding from this in the extreme south, basically south of Route 9.  At this point, areas north of that should be OK Forecasts might get updated and shifted, so stay tuned. 

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION

Hurricane Ida reminds me a lot of Hurricane Camille in 1969.  

Camille was even worse than Ida, but the story of the two storms is turning out to be eerily similar.

Camille roared ashore as an incredible Category 5 hurricane with top winds of 175 mph on August 17, 1969 in Pass Christian, Mississippi. The storm surge was over 24 feet there, which was at the time the record highest storm surge in U.S. history. (Katrina in 2005 topped that).

After making landfall, the remains of Camille moved inland, then bent east into West Virginia and Virginia, dumping over a foot of rain, with two feet in some locations. Most of the rain fell in just a few hours, and the resulting flash floods killed 113 people in the two states. The overall death toll from  Camille was 256.

The reason I bring all this up is the remains of Hurricane Ida are heading northeast, threatening some dangerous flooding well north of its landfall in Louisiana, especially up in Tennessee, Kentucky and West Virginia today, and tomorrow in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and the New York City metro area.

Flood watches extend in a broad band from the Florida Panhandle up through the western and central Appalachians all the way to the Middle Atlantic States and southern New England. 

I'm not saying there's going to be up to 31 inches of rain, like Camille in Virginia  back in the summer of '69.  But broad areas will have a half foot of rain or more, and theres a chance of a foot of rain in some of these spots.  The whole area under this flood threat has had a very sodden summer, so the soils are already primed for flooding.  

In other words, this could get really bad.

For my Vermont readers, we're in better shape. There's a chance that far southern Vermont could share in the flooding, we'll have to see how far north the heavy rain gets.  Forecasts vary, but for now, different sections of the Green Mountain State look like they'll get either manageable amounts of rain from the remains of Ida, or nothing at all.

This big flood threat from ex-Ida is not exactly helpful, since the hurricane caused an immense amount of damage already. 

The levees held in New Orleans, so the city didn't flood like it did during Katrina. But levees were overtopped in many other areas, so there's extensive flooding throughout southeastern Louisiana.

Wind damage is immense. Countless homes and buildings collapsed or lost roofs. The electrical grid is in shambles, and many people will need to wait a good six weeks or even more to get their power back. 

We don't have an estimated dollar amount of damage yet. That will take a lot of time to tally. Right now, they're in search and rescue mode in Louisiana. They're not ready to do the bean counting yet. 

So far there have four deaths connected to Ida, but that toll will go up. Probably sharply. 

The remains of Ida aren't the only ex-hurricane flood threat facing a part of the United States.

Hurricane Nora crashed into the west coast of northwestern Mexico over the weekend.  Lots of wet air streaming north from that storm's remains are coming into the Desert Southwest. Flash flooding is likely once again in Arizona today because of this situation.  

Hurricane Ida: Now Awaiting Word On Just How Bad Things Got

Roofing and other material littered New Orleans'

French Quarter during Hurrcane Ida. Photo: Eric Gay/AP

 When a big, disastrous storm strikes, it often takes a day, or more often several days, to understand just how bad things got. 

We're in that mode right now with Hurricane Ida.

As we all know by now, Ida crashed ashore in Louisiana with top winds of 150 mph.  We know of one death already, but that toll will surely rise as people get out to the hardest hit areas to check and see who made it and who didn't.

Judging from the social media posts and videos, we know there's huge storm surge damage, never mind what the wind did. New Orleans is entirely blacked out as the power grid basically blew away in Ida. People were pleading on social media for help as storm surges inundated the homes they were in, but nobody could come get them. The weather was too harsh in the midst of Ida.

Early images of New Orleans this morning shows collapsed buildings, windows blown off, and parts of facades ripped off of high rises.  We haven't even gotten much out of areas closer to the landfall area yet. I'm sure the updates will show plenty of devastation. Again. 

Ida's winds have now diminished, as that happens with all hurricanes that move inland. But it looks like it will continue creating a long stripe of flooding, some of it severe, all the way to New Jersey over the next couple of days.  The potential zone of nasty flooding includes Tennessee, where a devastating flash flood earlier this month killed about 20 people.. 

I can't even begin to imagine how stressful things were in Louisiana hospitals Sunday, and how stressful they'll continue to be. The hospitals are filled to the brim with Covid patients, and they all had to ride out the Ida Sunday.  

The roof of one Louisiana hospital is seen being ripped away in video posted on social media. No word yet on what's going on with the people who were in the hospital at the time.

These same hospitals will be slammed in the coming days with Ida-related injuries and illnesses and probably lots more  Covid cases. I don't even want to think about that anymore. 

One question I keep hearing is, "Why didn't people in harm's way evacuate? They knew Ida was coming.  Yes, there were some stubborn people that didn't leave despite warnings of unsurvivable storm surges and 150 mph winds.  

Hurricane Ida ripping the roof off of a hospital in

Louisiana Sunday. 

The bigger tragedy is that a lot of people didn't have the means to leave. They were essentially abandoned.  

If you don't have a car, or money to put gas in the car or money to get a hotel room or other shelter, you don't evacuate. All you can do is sit and hope for the best. Seems like there should have been some sort of system in place to give low income people the same chance at hurricane survival as those with more means.

But I guess poor people are dispensable.   I know that's harsh, and I shouldn't talk since I myself don't have a good plan in mind to help in these situations. But it just feels like we could do better.

Meanwhile, as Ida departs, people in Louisiana have a rough few weeks ahead of them.  Power will be out for weeks in some areas, which means no air conditioning. That's dangerous in a humid place like the Deep South.

The flood damage alone has to be immense, and will take months or even years to repair.  That's on top of the ongoing rebuilding from destructive hurricanes that hit Louisiana last year. Luckily, Hurricane Ida did not directly hit the areas that got nailed by three hurricanes last year. 

VERMONT IMPACTS

I wouldn't worry too much about Ida around here, at least at this point. 

Torrential showers that rolled through northern Vermont this morning had nothing to do with Ida, by the way.  The air has gotten very humid ahead of a cold front, so the pooled moisture made things ripe for downpours.  A disturbance ahead of the approaching cold front triggered those heavy showers.

The remains of Ida, as noted, will spread flooding rains through the Tennessee Valley and on into the Middle Atlantic States and probably southern New England. 

There's a lot of questions as to how far north those rains will get Wednesday night and Thursday.  Far southern Vermont in particular could get some drenching downpours from Ida, so we'll have to watch that.  The southern end of Vermont is still prone to flooding after a wet summer there.

Computer models are all over the place about the amount of rain and whether any of it gets as far as northern Vermont. Stay tuned. 

Hurricane Ida As Bad As It Gets

Hurricane Ida had its expected burst of rapid intensification overnight and early this morning and at last report early this morning, it had top winds of 145 mph. 

Extreme Hurricane Ida on approach to Louisiana
early this morning. 

Oops. It's still strengthening rapidly as I write this at 7 a.m.. Top winds are now 150 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. 

Conditions were already going downhill fast along the Louisiana coast and it will just get worse and worse as the day goes on. 

Everything about this is just beyond awful.  The storm surge near and just west of the mouth of the Mississippi River will be up to 16 feet. Large areas of the coastline in Louisiana and Mississippi should expect to see storm surges of six to 12 feet.

I hate to say it, but anybody who didn't evacuate from the large low lying areas where these storm surges are to hit will probably die. It's almost impossible to survive that. 

I worry about the people who didn't evacuate, either because they didn't have the transportation, money or means to go or because they were stubborn.  I hope everybody got out, and I hope there's still nobody stuck in gridlocked traffic as they tried to escape, as everything heading out of the hurricane zone yesterday was a parking lot.

Here's what the National Weather Service in New Orleans wrote last night. It's about as strong a message as you can send.  

"Once sustained tropical force winds move in first responders will button down and YOU WILL BE ON YOUR OWN.  Please understand this, there is the possibility that conditions could be unlivable along the coast for some time and areas around New Orleans and Baton Rouge could be without power for weeks. 

We have all seen the destruction and pain caused by Harvey, Michael and Laura. Anticipate devastation on this level and if it doesn't happen we should all count our blessings. Please again if you have the means to leave and you are 1. in a mandatory or voluntary evacuation zone, LEAVE. 2. are in  a very flood prone area, LEAVE. 3. are uncomfortable and have trees around your house, LEAVE."   

Most hurricane victims drown, either because of the storm surge or due to inland flooding.

There will be huge inland flooding, with up to two feet of rain forecast.  After it comes ashore, the remains of Ida could cause dangerous flooding in the coming days all the way up to Pennsylvania and possibly southern New England.

But that's down the road.  For today and this evening, the National Weather Service in New Orleans is warning residents of New Orleans, Baton Rouge and nearby areas to expect winds of over 110 mph, with 10 to as much as 20 inches of rain.   Those storm surges will inundate wide areas, include heavily populated areas around Lake Pontchartrain.

Basically, the storm surge will be as bad or nearly as bad as Katrina in 2005. And the winds will be quite a bit stronger than in Katrina when it made landfall.

That is all incredibly dangerous. And will be incredibly destructive and deadly.  I, and everybody else, is dreading this. 

Hurricane Ida will come ashore later today.  It's still in a healthy environment, so it could strengthen more.  Even if some miracle happens and Ida starts to weaken now, it's too little, too late. 

Ida is an incredibly strong, self sustaining hurricane, so anything that can weaken it - dry air entrainment from inland, an eye wall replacement cycle, or unexpected upper level winds  - won't come fast enough to prevent Ida from being a powerful, incredibly dangerous hurricane at landfall, even if top winds fall from their current screaming levels.

And, as noted, the hurricane could actually strengthen further. 

By the way, the eye wall replacement cycle, for those uninitiated, is when the strongest storms immediately around the eye die off to be replaced by another circle of intense storms around the eye that's a little larger. This can weaken the top winds of a hurricane some, but also increase the area raked by the strongest winds.

It's unclear whether Ida will go through this cycle before landfall or not.  I'm guessing not. This eye wall replacement nonsense I just wrote about won't matter much anyway. This is going to be rough, to say the least. A tragic day in American history. As if we haven't had enough of them lately. 

Hurricane Ida As Bad As It Gets; Enormous Trouble For Louisiana

UPDATE 2:15 pm. Saturday

Compare this satellite view of Hurricane Ida taken

early this afternoon compared to the early morning

image below and you can see that it has strengthen

and organized a lot since then

As expected, Hurricane Ida is gaining strength pretty rapidly. 

I wrote the post you see below at around 8 a.m., and in the six hours since, the hurricane has looked a lot more organized and symmetrical, and a well-defined eye formed.  An increase in strength usually lags a little while after an eye forms and a hurricane gets more organized.

That strengthening trend has definitely begun.  As of 1 p.m., strongest sustained winds with Ida were estimated at 100 mph.   Ida was moving over very warm Gulf water and upper level winds, or lack thereof, would encourage further strengthening, possibly rapid strengthening. 

This remains a huge, devastating threat to Louisiana. Hurricane Ida's track is now just a little bit east of where it was forecast, which is potentially bad.  If it keeps on that slightly more easterly track, it'll come ashore closer to New Orleans, and make things there worse.

However, strong hurricanes tend to wobble a bit in a subtle zigzag pattern, so it might sneak back west a tad. Who knows?

Wherever Ida hits, there will be real danger. To emphasize things, here's what the National Weather Service office in New Orleans tweeted this afternoon (capital letters theirs, not mine): "We once again stress that if you are under evacuation order or can leave, PLEASE LEAVE., DEVASTING conditions WILL happen." 

The evacuation itself is beginning to worry me. 

 Highways in the area are bumper to bumper, with some accidents and vehicle breakdowns making things worse. You want everybody off the highways before the rough weather arrives. People can be sitting ducks for real danger if they're on the road and the hurricane arrives.

There's still a little time to get everybody out of the way, so this piece is not a crisis yet.  But it's looking a little too chaotic for my tastes.

PREVIOUS DISCUSSION, 8 PM

Meteorologists for the past day or two have been filled with dread over Hurricane Ida.

For good reason. 

Hurricane Ida already looking ferocious early this morning

on this satellite image. It will only get stronger as the day

goes on and poses an enormous threat to Louisiana.

Everything is set up for it to be an extremely powerful hurricane as it roars northward through the Gulf of Mexico today and tomorrow with its sights set on Louisiana.

It's the worst kind of hurricane. It's expected to be a Category 4 storm at landfall and will be strengthening probably all the way to the coast.  There is going to be huge destruction in Louisiana, which has already been battered by several hurricanes in the past year or two

You could by yesterday that Ida was going to be in trouble. You could see it blossom from a disorganized tropical storm to a well-organized hurricane in just hours.  The center of Ida crossed the rugged terrain of western Cuba. You'd expect that land interaction to really disrupt Ida's circulation.

Instead, Hurricane Ida just seemed to hiccup, and this morning was rapidly developing once again.  After Ida emerged into the Gulf of Mexico early today, two extremely intense thunderstorm complexes formed on opposite sides of the eye and started to swirl around the center. That setup is usually a sign that a hurricane will intensify quickly.

So far, 150,000 people have been ordered out and away from the expected path of Ida in Louisiana. There really isn't time to evacuate all of New Orleans, but people there are being urged to go today.

New Orleans erected a $20 billion levee system after the extreme devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I guess this will be a test of whether these levees can hold back Ida's expected 11-foot surge. Meanwhile, more than a foot of wind-driven rain is expected to fall on New Orleans.  Will the pumps be able to at least partially keep up with the flooding rains, or will power fails and such silence the pumps, with extreme flooding resulting? 

Unfortunately, that's the question right now. 

By the way, Hurricane Ida is forecast to make landfall on the exact 16th anniversary of Katrina's strike on Louisiana.

Other parts of Louisiana and Mississippi are going to get bulldozed by this, too.  Remember, hospitals in this region are already overwhelmed with Covid cases.  Dozens or hundreds of injuries and other emergencies from Ida won't be managed as well as usual.  This problem will extend well inland, as torrential rains will spread dangerous flooding all the way to Tennessee and probably beyond.

I know a lot of this seems like hype. After all, didn't the last one -Henri in the Northeast - turn out to be not as bad as advertised?

Sure, there's a chance Ida might not strengthen as much as forecast. Perhaps the Gulf Coast will get lucky and some dry air will get sucked into the circulation, causing Ida to falter.

Don't count on that.  Hurricane Ida will travel over super warm Gulf of Mexico waters. Such hot water is jet fuel for hurricanes. Upper level winds will be light, so the thunderstorms that surround Ida's center will continue to get stronger, thereby boosting the hurricane further. 

A lot of it comes down to exactly where Hurricane Ida comes ashore. The hurricane will be catastrophic no matter where it lands. So I guess you want it to come in where it will affect the least amount of people.

The worst case scenario is if it comes in just west of New Orleans. That would put NOLA into the most extreme push of storm surges, and the strongest winds.  

People in Louisiana don't have much time left to prepare or get out of Dodge. The weather will start going downhill this afternoon or tonight in southern Louisiana. Gasoline, drinking water and other supplies are probably going fast.

People who are sheltering in place will face no electricity and even worse gas and supply shortages in the days immediately after the storm, so that will be an issue.

Even if everybody heeds warnings and gets out of the way, many of the deaths and injuries from hurricanes comes after the wind dies down.  People get hurt chain sawing their way out of a sea of fallen trees, they have heart attacks and strokes from the stress, come down with heat-related illnesses since there's no air conditioning, or get hurt or injured in a myriad of ways during the immediate post-hurricane cleanup.

And, as mentioned, there's Covid, and the highly contagious Delta variant of that virus. Put a bunch of unvaccinated people in emergency shelters and that just makes the wave of Covid hospitalizations and deaths that much worse.

So yeah, I'm absolutely dreading this storm. We'd be crazy not to.