Tropical Storm Henri didn’t live up to any worst-case scenarios and almost missed New Hampshire, although it brought a few small tornadoes and minor flooding in its wake, and produced a soggy mess further south.
The state’s southern tier had braced for high winds and heavy rains Sunday as Henri made landfall but were mostly spared because the storm landed in Rhode Island, then veered east rather than north. Scattered power outages and some minor flooding was reported near the Massachusetts line but less than half an inch fell in Concord and no damage was reported. Heavy surf along the coast also caused some damage.
A tornado spun off the storm as it left the region Monday and touched down in Marlboro, Mass., and another was spotted near Greenville, New Hampshire. No injuries or major damage was reported either time.
In Connecticut, however, the storm dumped more than 5 inches of rain Sunday in several locations, according to reports on the citizen science site Cocorahs.org, with more coming Monday on the backside of the storm. Tens of thousands of people were without power Sunday in Rhode Island, where the strongest winds were felt.
President Joe Biden has declared disasters in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont and Connecticut, opening the purse strings for federal recovery aid to those states.
New England was spared partly because Henri weakened quickly, from hurricane to tropical storm, after it moved into the colder waters of Long Island Sound.
At its peak on Sunday afternoon, the storm left more than 140,000 households without power from New Jersey to Maine. The storm prompted Providence, R.I., and New Bedford, Mass., to close the hurricane barriers in their ports, the first time they had done so for a storm since Hurricane Sandy in 2012. The Coast Guard closed most Northeast ports in anticipation of the storm but reopened them as of 4 p.m. Monday.
Conditions were much worse further south, an indication of how things could have gone in New England if the storm’s path had been slightly different. No deaths have been attributed to Henri.
In Rossmoor, a retirement community in central New Jersey’s Monroe Township, the smell of sewage filled the air as residents returned to soaked homes and ruined possessions after Henri turned their streets into rivers.
“This is what we were left with. Nothing, nothing,” lamented Roseann Kiernan. “They told us that everything has to go.”
In nearby Jamesburg, another hard-hit New Jersey community, Luke Becker, co-owner of the Four Boys ice cream stand, said nearly 4 feet of water rushed into the shop, dislodging a tall cooler and leaving 3 inches of mud behind.
“We were initially hoping to be back open by Labor Day, but now it looks like we’ve got to go through all the plumbing and rip out a ton of electrical because we don’t know how much of that was affected,” he said. “Right now there’s really no timetable.”
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy toured the storm-ravaged towns Monday, which remained under a flood warning until midnight.
“The ground is so saturated with water that every inch of rain creates immediate floods and flash floods,” Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont said Monday after seeing damage in the community of Canterbury, where nearly every home lost power.