Strong winds knock out power to hundreds of thousands across the Northeast

Intense wind gusts knocked down trees and power lines throughout the Northeast on Dec. 19, before leading to dangerous snow squalls in the evening.

Transcript

00:00but let's go to the northeast now it's also been very windy with planes struggling to land at the

00:05airport there in rochester new york anna now this is the second time i'm seeing this video now i can

00:10assure you the plane landed though this is the last type of flight i personally want to be on

00:15yeah how do you feel about the shaky landing i don't know you know statistically i know they're

00:20you know we've had plane crashes we've reported on even this week which is always very sad but

00:24statistically it's a safe way to go i got a lot of faith in the pilots i really do all right i

00:28i should have known you would jump to the statistics yeah it's a numbers thing you're a

00:33numbers guy i'm a numbers guy i have a friend who's a pilot flies out of fresno all the time he's doing

00:37great work i don't know they got a lot of faith in them all right and this pilot uh evidently doing

00:41great work as well now the wind has been dying down but let's take a look at the damage it has caused

00:48now throughout the evening i've focused in a lot on the east coast because that's where we had a lot

00:51of airport delays even ground stop at la guardia at one point but we're starting to see snow squall

00:56reports into central and western pennsylvania so i do want to focus in on that briefly into central

01:01pennsylvania visibility below a quarter of a mile so yes the snow hasn't been falling for too too long

01:07we're not seeing a lot of accumulation but even wind gusts that are you know 20 30 miles an hour can

01:13lead to these snow squall situations another one in western pennsylvania talking about a quarter of a

01:18mile visibility wind gusts 25 knots so in the ballpark of 20 miles per hour just about estimating

01:26there converting from knots to miles per hour we go to the east coast and we have more damage down

01:31trees we even have had reports of not just closing roads which is this report here in new jersey but

01:38we've had reports of trees falling on cars thankfully the one i have seen it was unoccupied

01:43trees falling onto homes a lot of dangerous situations here because of the 50 60 plus mile per

01:49hour wind gusts we've had throughout the day they're improving though at this point 26 mile per hour

01:54gusts in boston 32 in scran 38 in pittsburgh but again once we have the snow and we still have 20 30

02:01plus mile per hour wind gusts that can then lead to snow squalls so a lot of different issues we're

02:06seeing as conditions change we see the temperatures drop behind the front which is another portion of

02:10the story i'll focus on in just a minute but we still have power outages that we're resolving

02:14pennsylvania the numbers are coming down at one point we were more than 100 000 customers without power

02:19but all of these states together i mean it's tens of thousands more than 100 000 customers without

02:24power the good news is that those numbers are starting to dwindle down while we do still have

02:30some gusty winds it's not bad enough in many areas that prohibit the power crews from doing the work

02:35sometimes there's restrictions about going up in the bucket truck when we still have very strong wind

02:39gusts so it is going to be snow mostly from here on out some snow showers though we see enough that we get

02:45some of those snow squall conditions we go ahead into saturday we have another system that moves

02:49through these are not high impact as far as the precipitation but it continues the temperature

02:54roller coaster that we've been experiencing the same deal into the weekend a lot of us we don't see

02:59the temperature drop until sunday into monday though pittsburgh you're the exception to the rule