The Associated Press
Heavy rains pounded an already saturated Northeast on Sunday for the second time in a week, spurring another round of flash flooding, cancelled airline flights and power outages. In Pennsylvania, a sudden flash flood late Saturday afternoon claimed at least five lives.
Officials in Bucks County’s Upper Makefield Township in Pennsylvania said torrential rains occurred around 5:30 p.m. Saturday in the Washington Crossing area, sweeping away several cars. At least five people died and two others, a 9-month-old boy and a 2-year-old girl, remained missing, authorities said.
Sunday’s strong storms led to hundreds of flight cancellations at airports in the New York City area, according to the tracking service FlightAware. More than 350 flights were canceled at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey alone, while more than 280 flights were canceled at Kennedy International Airport in New York. Hundreds of flights were also delayed.
On Sunday morning, the National Weather Service issued a tornado warning for Philadelphia and parts of Montgomery County. Thousands of power outages also were reported in the region.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul urged people to stay home and not drive Sunday until the storms passed.
The governor said work crews were checking the integrity of roads and dams hit by flooding around the state, which saw $50 million in damages caused by last week’s storms. Disaster declarations will cover more than a dozen New York counties.
Manchester, New Hampshire, the largest city in northern New England, opened its emergency operations center in response to severe weather. Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig and other officials urged residents to stay inside if possible.
In north New Jersey, some roads were closed Sunday as crews worked to repair stretches of fragmented concrete that had buckled under the stress of heavy rain and flooding. Local creeks washed over passageways and a rockslide blocked passage along Route 46. Thoroughfares were a mess of water and rocks covered in brown sludge.
Heavy precipitation was not the only extreme weather plaguing the U.S. A scorching heat wave across the U.S. Southwest has put roughly one-third of Americans under some type of heat watch or warning. That includes brutal temperatures in the hottest place on Earth — Death Valley, which runs along part of central California’s border with Nevada. Las Vegas also faced the possibility of reaching an all-time record temperature Sunday.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency posted air quality alerts for several states stretching from Montana to Ohio on Sunday because of smoke blowing in from Canadian wildfires. Hochul, the New York governor, said she expected air quality alerts to be issued for northern and western parts of New York state Monday because of the wildfires.
“Air Quality alerts are in place for much of the Great Lakes, Midwest, and northern High Plains,” the National Weather Service said. “This is due to the lingering thick concentration of Canadian wildfire smoke over these regions.”
