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| A road washout after heavy rains from yesterday's nor'easter near Lincoln, Vermont. Photo from WPTZ-TV |
One surefire way to measure a storm's relative strength is to measure its lowest air pressure. (Storms are always areas of lower pressure. By this measure, Thursday's storm in many areas of New England was the strongest October one on record.)
For instance, the pressure at Boston fell to 975.3 millibars or 28.80 inches. That's a very low pressure, and is something you might get if a dying hurricane from the south came across New England. Pretty impressive.
As noted yesterday, these kinds of storms produce lots of wind, and more than a half million people in the Northeast lost power during the storm.
Here in Vermont, Green Mountain Power, easily the state's largest utility, reported 25,000 homes and businesses without power.
Things were a lot better early this morning. Vermont Outage Map reported about 1,100 homes and other Vermont buildings without electricity just before dawn today.
Aside from lots of fallen trees and branches and broken power lines, the storm wasn't as damaging in Vermont as it could have been. In most places, the highest wind gusts stayed under 50 mph. (There were several exceptions, with less than a dozen Vermont towns reporting gusts higher than 50 mph.
Burlington looked like a mess yesterday, with tons and tons of small twigs and branches down, and minor street flooding from leaf-clogged storm drains. But as chaotic as the Queen City looked, there wasn't a whole lot of damage. Only a few trees came down and there was very little structural damage. if any.
We dodged a bullet with flooding, too. The heaviest rain fell in southern and western Vermont, mostly from Burlington south. Several towns reported well over three inches of rain, which a LOT for a single storm in Vermont.
Springfield had 4.4 inches, Rutland clocked in with 3.78 inches, Bridport was close with 3.72 inches and Bethel had 3.2 inches.
The heaviest rain seemed to fall on the parts of Vermont that before the storm were the driest. (northern and especially northeastern Vermont were drier than further south and west before the storm. And the nor'easter dropped less rain in the Northeast Kingdom than elsewhere in the state.
Had it been very wet before this storm, there would have been significant flooding. This time, only minor flooding and relatively inconsequential washouts were reported. The Otter Creek hit minor flood stage and a couple roads near Middlebury closed due to high water.
WPTZ-TV also reported a road washout in Lincoln, high water on the New Haven River and water across the road along Route 116 in Bristol.
With this storm and others, October, 2019 is turning into a wet month in Vermont, especially in the north. Burlington has so far had just under four inches of rain so far this month. Normal for all of October is a little over three inches. The wettest October in Burlington was in 1918, with 6.75 inches.
Here at my house in St. Albans, I've unofficially collected 4.8 of rain this month, including 2.25 inches from the nor'easter yesterday.
On top of that, more rain is on the way. Possibly a fair amount, too. A messy system in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to become Tropical or Subtropical Storm Nestor later today and the weekend.
This will cause heavy rain, storm surges and other severe weather over the weekend near the Gulf Coast.. Meanwhile, another strong storm and cold front will start to march toward us from the Midwest early next week.
By Tuesday into Wednesday, moisture from the Atlantic, Gulf and maybe wannabe Nestor, and the dynamic cold front from the west could dump a good bit of rain on us. Nobody knows precisely how much yet, but early indications are it won't be as much as we got yesterday. Which is good, because a repeat of Thursday would bring us a flood problem.
Longer range forecasts are iffy, but for what they're worth, these forecasts predict wetter than normal conditions in Vermont through the end of October.
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