In Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts, the remnants of Ida brought heavy rains, flooding, sewage overflow, power outages and road damage Wednesday night and Thursday. The region remains under a flood warning until 6:30 pm tonight.
Aquidneck Island experienced some of the heaviest rainfall and flooding. In Portsmouth, a road partially collapsed from the force of floodwaters. According to local officials, Fairview Lane crumbled when an artery for the town’s drainage system running underneath the road was overwhelmed by the rainfall.
Neighbors said the resulting scene they awoke to Thursday morning was astounding. The pavement had caved in on one side of the road, fragmenting in some areas like shattered glass. Several deep chasms stretched feet into the ground.
Clay Commons has lived at the bottom of the steep road for nearly four decades and said he was “shocked” when he ventured outside at 5 a.m. Thursday morning.
“We’ve had hurricanes. We’ve had Hurricane Bob, the perfect storm. Hurricane Grace, Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Henri. Nothing like this,” Commons said. “Nothing has torn up the road this badly.”
A worker for the town of Portsmouth said the water mains were still intact, but workers planned on turning off the water sometime Thursday to begin repairs.
Sarah Seaman, who lives just off Fairview Lane in Portsmouth, described the devastation as a “serious wake-up call” around the threat of climate change.
“We need to really think about what’s going on with our planet,” Seaman said. “We’re definitely in a warmer climate, and that creates more intense, active storms than we’ve ever seen before. And I think people really need to think about their everyday choices and how we can help to counterbalance these effects, because it’s only going to get worse.”
Portsmouth averages less than four inches of rain during the entire month of September. But within the past 24 hours, about eight inches fell on parts of the town.
In Newport, City Manager Joe Nicholson reported “significant flooding” in the usual flood-prone parts of town, but he said it was starting to recede by midday Thursday. There were also reports of boat damage in Newport Harbor.
“We were out pulling people off of boats that needed help at three o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the morning,” said Nicholson. “[They] were trying to ride out the storm, but it obviously got too intense.”
The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management announced Thursday that it was closing many of the state’s shellfish harvesting areas until September 9, because of the downpour from Hurricane Ida’s remnants.
“This excessive rain caused extreme stormwater runoff and, in some areas, triggered wastewater treatment bypasses, combined sewer overflows, and sewer system overflows that can convey contaminants into shellfish harvest areas,” the DEM wrote in a statement.
Urban flooding reported across Rhode Island
Cranston is also experiencing flooding after getting more than four inches of rain, according to the National Weather Service.
“Most of our flooding was urban areas,” said city fire chief James Warren on Thursday. “When it comes down very hard, very quickly that’s what creates the problem for us.”
Those areas in Cranston included several roads where inland and urban flooding can be typical for the city. On Thursday morning Fletcher Avenue was closed to the public, Warren said.
Residents from some eight apartments in a building along Oaklawn Avenue were evacuated due to flooding. Residents were relocated to the city’s senior center, and were being assisted by the Red Cross.
The Pawtuxet River — whose banks overflowed some ten years ago, causing major damage — was at minor flood stage Thursday.
“We’re hoping with the good weather now, it will flow out into the bay, and the flooding will go down and reduce,” Warren said. “[The river] is over the banks a little bit in the Wellington Avenue area, so we are concerned about that.
Parts of Warwick can also be prone to urban flooding, as well as flooding due to overflowing banks along the Pawtuxet. According to a spokesperson for the mayor’s office there was minimal to no flooding issues in the city.
In Bristol, police reported many routes through town closed due to flooding. Flooding also temporarily closed I-95 in Providence and Route 24 in Fall River.
National Grid reported several hundred households in Rhode Island were without power Thursday morning. By the afternoon, however, fewer than 30 outages remained.
Southeastern Massachusetts experiences widespread flooding
In southeastern Massachusetts, Fall River Mayor Paul Coogan said the city “had our usual hotspots.”
One of those sites, Stafford Square, flooded out around 2 or 3 a.m. According to Coogan, the fire department rescued a few people from cars on Cove Street. “The timing of the storm helped us,” he said.
The rain stopped in Fall River around 7:30 a.m. Coogan said the city received 6.5 inches of rain in total.
A number of schools were closed in Rhode Island on Thursday. In southeastern Massachusetts, two Fall River schools closed for the day: Alfred S. Letourneau Elementary School and the Argosy Collegiate Charter Middle School. The regional school district in Marion, Mattapoisett and Rochester delayed the start of school by two hours. The public school systems in Acushnet and Wareham did the same.
Storm leaves at least 26 dead across Northeast
The remnants of Hurricane Ida cut a deadly swath across other northeastern states, with at least 26 deaths now linked to flooding in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania as basement apartments suddenly filled with water and freeways and boulevards turned into rivers, submerging cars.
At least 12 deaths were reported in New York City. A New York City police spokesperson said a total of 11 people died when they became trapped in flooded basements. Officials outside of Philadelphia reported “multiple fatalities,” saying no additional details were immediately available.
Climate change is projected to bring more heavy rainfall to the northeastern United States, as warmer air can hold more moisture.
Rhode Island and Massachusetts have already seen increases in the number of extreme weather events with more than 2 inches of rainfall, in recent years, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration.
“It’s been a crazy summer. We’ve seen lots of things that are associated with climate change: fires, extreme rainfall, droughts, flooding. All of these have been predicted since back in the 80s,” said Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper, who works on modeling the effects of climate change at Brown University. “But since we have not reduced our emissions very much, we’re now starting to see these not as projections for the future, but in terms of things that we’re observing now.”
An Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released last month found that eastern North America is very likely to see further increases in average precipitation and extreme precipitation events, along with increased flooding, as a result of human-caused climate change.
“And we actually expect intensification, up to about 2050 or so regardless of what we do,” Fox-Kemper continued. “So hopefully, we can improve things beyond 2050 by greatly reducing our emissions right away.”
With reports from the Associated Press.
