PROVIDENCE – Ninety-seven Rhode Island Energy customers remained without electricity as of 5:30 p.m. on Thursday after a nor'easter tore through the state earlier in the day and left nearly 700 customers without power, the majority of which were in Woonsocket.
Rhode Island Energy spokesperson Evelyn Garcia said the outages were storm-related and as of 4 p.m., power had been restored in Woonsocket, where 640 had lost electricity.
Garcia said Rhode Island Energy has
an estimated 40 internal crews and secured 25 additional crews and 24 trouble-workers working on storm recovery.
The storm brought strong winds that produced gusts of 40 to 50 miles per hour on the coast and heavy rain across the region.
The National Weather Service is predicting rain of 1 to 2 inches per hour during the Thursday evening commute. A coastal flood advisory is in effect along the coast. The steady rain is expected to end by Friday morning.
The heaviest rain was expected to fall in Rhode Island and southern and eastern Massachusetts, said Kyle Pederson, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Boston. Localized nuisance flooding and difficult driving conditions were possible Thursday, but catastrophic flooding was not expected.
The Block Island Ferry canceled all services Thursday due to the rough sea conditions brought on by the storm.
Temperatures will remain in the 40s, unseasonably cool for this time of year. The National Weather Service said temperatures could reach the 70s on Memorial Day, May 26.
A nor'easter is an East Coast storm that is so named because winds over the coastal area are typically from the northeast, according to the National Weather Service. The storms can happen at any time of the year, but they are at their most frequent and strongest between September and April, according to the service.
The storms have caused billions of dollars in damage in the past. They usually reach the height of their strength in New England and eastern Canada. The storms often disrupt traffic and power grids and can cause severe damage to homes and businesses.
“We have a stronger jet stream, which is helping intensify a low-pressure system that just happens to be coming up the coast. And so that’s how it got the nor’easter name,” Pederson said.
Nor’easters are usually winter weather events and it is unusual to see them in May. They typically form when there are large temperature differences from west to east during winter when there is cold air over land and the oceans are relatively warm.
But right now there is a traffic jam in the atmosphere because of an area of high pressure in the Canadian Arctic that is allowing unusually cold air to funnel down over the Northeast. The low-pressure system off the East Coast is being fueled by a jet stream that is unusually south at the moment.
“It really is a kind of a winter-type setup that you rarely see this late,” said Judah Cohen, seasonal forecast director at the private firm Atmospheric and Environmental Research.
If this type of pattern in the atmosphere happened two months earlier, he said, “we’d be talking about a crippling snowstorm in the Northeastern U.S., not just a wet start to Memorial Day weekend.”
(UPDATE recasts the lead to show that 97 Rhode Island Energy customers were still without power as of 5:30 p.m.)
Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.
