Debby’s remnants bring tornado alerts and snarl East Coast air traffic

The remnants of Tropical Storm Debby moved up the East Coast on Friday, inundating parts of north-central Pennsylvania, prompting tornado alerts and causing airport delays in some of the major Northeast cities.

The National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for parts of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Vermont. And states of emergency were declared Friday for New York state, New Jersey and Pennsylvania on Friday in anticipation of heavy rains and thunderstorms.

“Unfortunately, even in Debby’s weakened state, dangerous flash flooding and severe weather will continue” through Saturday across portions of the Carolinas, Mid-Atlantic, interior Northeast and New England, forecasters from the Weather Prediction Center said.

In the borough of Westfield, Pennsylvania, 170 miles northwest of Scranton, volunteer firefighters were working Friday afternoon to evacuate several people from flooded homes as the local Cowanesque River soared to a record 13 feet.

“We’re in action right now. We have multiple people trapped,” Fire Chief Bill Goltz said in an interview.

The storm had been linked to two deaths in North Carolina.

The weather caused delays at some airports in the region.

LaGuardia Airport in New York issued a ground delay just after 8 a.m. Friday and flights were delayed by an average of 82 minutes, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. In a post on social media, the airport warned passengers of flight disruptions and advised them to check in with their airlines regarding their flight status.

Kennedy International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport were also experiencing delays from 45 to 125 minutes, the FAA said. Boston Logan International Airport reported departure delays of 143 minutes, and authorities warned passengers to check with their airlines before arriving at the airport.

In Washington, D.C., flights to and from Ronald Reagan National Airport were facing delays, the FAA said.

Overnight, the storm system brought rain once again to coastal Carolina, escalating the flooding situation in the northern suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina. Some residents who thought the worst had passed them woke to floodwaters in their homes. Showers or thunderstorms could return to coastal Carolina on Friday afternoon.

“Make no mistake: This stubborn storm and its effects are not over,” Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina said in a news conference Friday.

One of the tornadoes spawned by Debby killed a man and damaged a school in Lucama, North Carolina, about 36 miles east of Raleigh.

The storm caused a second death Thursday in Rockingham County, about 25 miles north of Greensboro, North Carolina, where Hilda Windsor Jones, 78, was killed when a tree fell on her mobile home, according to the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office.

Debby’s remnants Friday were simultaneously weakening and accelerating northeastward along the spine of the Blue Ridge, forecasters said. As it moves through the region, some storms have been acting like train cars on a track, repeating over the same areas and prompting flood warnings in Virginia, especially around Washington, where Metro lines were briefly snagged Friday because of station flooding.

The storm system is volatile enough that some tornadoes might form. There was at least one possible tornado seen on radar Friday morning in the Washington metro area that prompted a warning notification. A few tornadoes remained possible across the Mid-Atlantic through the morning.

That risk will move farther into the Northeast as the day progresses. In New York, there is also a “possibility of tornadoes” in the eastern half of state, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s emergency declaration stated.

This declaration gives the state’s executives broad authority to direct resources like New York’s water and fire rescue teams and its 7,200 Department of Public Service workers to support local jurisdictions that are most impacted.

About 150,000 customers were without power in New York, Philadelphia and New Jersey Friday night, according to PowerOutage.us.

As of Friday afternoon, New York’s hardest-hit region was Steuben County, which borders Pennsylvania. The weather service declared a flash flood emergency for the area, confirming “numerous homes, roads, bridges” were flooded and that people were trapped.

The area close to the storm’s path is likely to have a quick 3 to 7 inches of rainfall that could create considerable to locally catastrophic flooding through Saturday morning.

On Saturday, a full week after Debby formed in the Gulf of Mexico, the storm system will exit the United States, and a more settled weather pattern will push into the eastern U.S.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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