Nor'easter Slams New England; Vermont Very Wet And Windy

Lots of damage from last night's nor'easter in Lynn, Massachusetts
Photo via Twitter, @marshallhook.

Boy, this nor''easter really packed a punch in southern New England overnight!

It's a mess down there, with fallen trees everwhere. No wonder, with reported gusts of 90 mph in Provincetown, 89 mph in Wellfleet and 88 mph in Fairhaven, all in Massachusetts.

The Weather Channel reported that more than 500,000 people were without electricity in different parts of the Northeast overnight.

The nor'easter then moved inland and early this morning was on the New Hampshire/Vermont border, a little below White River Junction. 

That means we in Vermont, as expected are in for a miserable day.

The worst of it will be in western Vermont and eastern New York, as a pretty good rain band has set up there, and could linger for a good part of the day.  In eastern Vermont, the rain might be more showery.  Strong storms like this often ingest a band of drier air into the system, leaving parts of the storm area with less rain.

Rain in the western half of the area could be enough to cause some mostly minor flooding, especially along the Ausable River in New York and possible a little bit along the Otter Creek, Mad and Winooski rivers and maybe a couple others.  The National Weather Service in South Burlington  has flood watches up for most of Vermont, except the Northeast Kingdom.

Flood warnings are already up for the parts of the Capital District of New York, around Albany, as two inches of rain had already fallen as of early this morning and more downpours were coming.

In Vermont, it won't be a huge flood, but something to watch out for regardless.

The heavy rain will cause local street flooding, especially given that so many leaves have fallen to clog storm drains.

Strong winds might be the real story today.

Winds were really starting to pick up in Vermont before dawn this morning. This will be a problem for much of the day, especially over the western half of Vermont and especially between now and, say, mid-afternoon.

High winds have already blown throught southern and eastern Vermont overnight.  Winds gusted to 66 mph around Bennington, for instance. As of early this morning, about 10,000 homes and businesses were without power in the Green Mountain State. Most of those outages were in the southeastern half of the state.

However, those power outages will probably spread into the northwestern half of the state during the rest of the morning, as wind gusts could reach as high as 55 mph in a few spots. Shortly after dawn, the wind gusted to 54 mph at Thompson's Point in Charlotte, which is on Lake Champlain.

So yeah, bottom line is this is a pretty damn impressive storm.

Starting this evening, the storm will begin to wind down. Rain and wind will both diminish. It'll be a cool and somewhat cloudy day Friday.

Another soaking rain is possible during the middle of next week. We'll have to watch that one. Things are soaked down now, and a particularly heavy rain could cause flooding problems. It's too soon to say how hard it will rain next week, so we really can't be specific on whether a flooding risk will come up.