Epic Northeast Storm: I Have No Words

Chaos in Watertown, Massachusetts amid the epic winds
of the current Nor'easter. 

I'm not going to give you a long discussion of the storm pummeling the Northeast today. I'll get my thoughts together and give you that over the weekend.

But this is absolutely extreme by any measure. It'll easily be among the top 10 non-tropical storms to hit the Northeast in the past century.

I'll just give you a few factoids that gives you a picture of how incredible the storm has been so far. And by the way, it's going to be a very rough night, especially in coastal areas from Maryland north to Maine.

As of late this afternoon, I'm aware of two deaths associated with the storm, and that death toll will surely rise. A six year old boy died when a tree crushed a mobile home in Chester, Virginia. A woman, age 77, died when a tree fell on a house in Baltimore County Maryland.

Top wind gusts so far have been 88 mph in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, 83 mph in East Falmouth, Massachusetts, and 83 mph in Little Compton, Rhode Island. To give you an idea how awful the weather is in coastal Massachusetts, here's the conditions as of 6 p.m. on Nantucket Island: Temperature, 41 degrees. Heavy rain. Wind north at 53 gusting to 75 mph.

Water levels were four feet above normal at low tide this evening. Imagine how bad things will be at high tide tonight.

Scary scene today in Scituate, Massachusetts. At around
 11 p.m. tonight in terrifying darkness, the tides, waves
 and floods will be even worse than this. 

Dulles airport in suburban Washington DC recorded wind gusts of at least 50 mph for at least 12 consecutive hours.

The airport closed when it became unsafe: Winds gusts as high as 71 mph forced the evacuation of the Dulles control tower.

In New York City, video on social media shows winds blowing the roof off at least one building there.  

No fewer than one million people in the Northeast have power outages.

In New York State, especially south and west of Albany, the problem was incredible snowfall. The snow is also wet and heavy, which means it's practically impossible to move. So far, we've gotten reports of 37.5 inches in Richmond, New York and 34.5 in Jefferson, New York.

As I've been harping on, the worst destruction is from the storm surge and battering waves. Severe flooding was widespread in Massachusetts during today's midday high tide. Later tonight, the storm surge and waves could easily be even worse. 

As destructive as today's high tide was, tonight's could be as bad or worse than in the Blizzard of 1978 and the Perfect Storm of 1991.

For most of the Northeast, this storm is one of a handful of candidates for Storm of the Century. Which is why I feel lucky to be living just outside the severe storm zone in northwestern Vermont. Up here, the storm rated as Snow Flurry Of the Week.

It was kind of rough in southern Vermont, but up here in the north, we dodged a real bullet: All we got was an inch of snow with wind gusts of 30 mph.

Boring never felt so good.