A swath of East Coast states was on edge Tuesday as an expected Nor’easter — the second in less than a week — was rumbling toward the region, threatening 45 million people with strong winds and up to a foot of snow in some parts.
The latest storm, which comes on the heels of last week’s deadly Nor’easter that cut power to tens of thousands, won’t bring the same intense winds and flooding, forecasters said. The system is expected to be fast-moving and will peak Wednesday afternoon through the night before moving out by Thursday morning.
Snow is expected to start falling in the New York City area late Tuesday with little accumulation. But by mid-morning Wednesday, the anticipated Nor’easter will be in full swing, and estimates for New York City top out between 8 to 12 inches, up to a foot in parts of New Jersey and Connecticut, and 6 inches in Boston.
The rain-snow line could make exact totals difficult to calculate. If the storm moves southeast, the snowfall totals could rise, forecasters said.
Related: Second storm forecast for East Coast already struggling with power outages
By late Wednesday, winds could reach between 30 and 40 mph, but snowfall will be gradually decreasing until the storm rolls out early Thursday.
The storm, meanwhile, could threaten more flooding in coastal cities, such as Duxbury, Massachusetts. Crews in the historic seaside town south of Boston were working to prevent a second round of flooding after a seawall collapsed during last week’s storm.
“It’s a barrier beach, and if you start losing the seawall, you start losing ground and you start losing houses,” said Duxbury Fire Department Chief Kevin Nord.
At least 100,000 residents of Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Delaware and Connecticut were still without electricity after the previous Nor’easter, which is linked to the deaths of at least nine people, including one child in New York and another in Virginia who were killed by felled trees.
As some in New York face their fourth day without power, crews were racing to resolve the outages before the second storm moves in, said ConEdison spokesman Michael Clendenin. Heavy wet snow could bring down more power lines that have already been weakened.
“We’ve got 400 mutual aid crews out now. We expect even more to come in as the days go on because we know this other storm is coming,” Clendenin told “Today.”
The latest storm aiming for the East Coast has created white-out conditions in parts of the Northern Plains and the Midwest because of the combination of high winds and heavy snow.
Winter storm watches and warnings were issued across the Northeast in anticipation of Nor’easter conditions.