“Hazardous Weather Outlook” for Northern New Jersey

We have a lot of weather happening in the next few days – and some of it could be risky to life and property.

Hurricane Joaquin is creating “extremely risky conditions” in the Bahamas, according to the National Weather Service, and the United States won’t be immune to its extreme side effects, on top of a separate storm system. More flooding is possible early next week.

The National Weather Service in Albany is warning that heavy rain could drop up to 4 inches of rain on the Capital Region by Thursday.

In Spartanburg, South Carolina, the heavy rains flooded and closed streets.

“The latest weather data suggests that we will experience more significant rain showers tomorrow (Thursday) night and Friday“, said Jeffrey S. Paul, director of the Morris County Office of Emergency Management.

“A persistent easterly low level flow is expected to result in increasing coverage of moderate to heavy rain showers across the area through the morning”, the NWS said. As always, if residents have an emergency, they should call 911.

“The official track for Tropical Storm Joaquin now places the storm off of the North Carolina coast through Sunday night”, Paul said.

“People should not let their guard down due to a shifting track of the hurricane as the risk to lives and property in this complex situation remains high”, said Alex Sosnowski, AccuWeather.com Senior Meteorologist. The utility said it has about 150 linemen, 250 contractors and more than 200 tree crews available to respond to outages.

While heavy rain will be possible at any point through the weekend, the greatest threat of excessive and flooding rainfall will be late Friday into Saturday and then again Sunday and into Monday.

The rain is accompanied by winds gusting to 25 miles per hour. The next briefing package will be released no later than 3 p.m. September 30, the National Weather Service said.

“Hurricane Joaquin is forecast to come very close to the Mid-Atlantic coast, and possibly move inland, said the Capital Weather Gang”.

The Finger Lakes Local Weather Center is reporting that additional rain amounts between a quarter and half of an inch are possible today. So, we don’t need a hurricane to produce flooding rainfall.

In Southampton Town, the highway, police and fire departments are all preparing for the storm, and on Thursday afternoon town officials announced the Emergency Operations Center was prepared to be “fully operational” if Hurricane Joaquin impacts the region.