More than two and a half million customers lost power and at least one person was killed after Tropical Storm Isaias tore through New York, New Jersey and Connecticut on Tuesday, battering the region with heavy rain, tornadoes and nearly hurricane-force winds.
In New York City and Westchester County, around 267,000 Con Edison customers had lost power by nightfall as a result of Isaias — second only to Hurricane Sandy in 2012 in terms of storm-related outages, said Allan Drury, a spokesman for the utility.
New Jersey was hit even harder. More than 1.2 million utility customers in the state were without service as of 10 p.m., as were more than 600,000 in Connecticut. Across New York State, more than 800,000 had no service.
Many of those who were affected could be waiting a while for their power to come back.
“It will be days, not hours,” Mr. Drury said, citing the scale of the repairs that workers would need to make once the damage had been assessed.
East of the city, more than 300,000 of PSEG Long Island’s nearly 1.2 million customers had no power as of 7 p.m. Elizabeth Flagler, a utility spokeswoman, said “some outages could last for an extended period” even with crews working 16-hour shifts to restore them.
In New Jersey, Gov. Philip D. Murphy offered a similar forecast for how long it could take to bring power back to those who had lost it.
“Some of these outages may last for a few days due to the severity of the storm,” Mr. Murphy wrote on Twitter at around 4 p.m.
The strong winds that caused some of the outages by knocking branches and entire trees onto power lines also took a human toll.
A 60-year-old man who was sitting on the passenger side of a car on 84th Drive in Briarwood, Queens, was killed when a tree fell on the vehicle around 12:40 p.m., the police said.
About an hour and a half later, a 49-year-old woman was critically injured when she was struck by a falling tree branch on Dumont Avenue in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, the police said.
The storm, which made landfall in North Carolina as a hurricane, moved swiftly up the East Coast. By 3 p.m., high winds were already causing mayhem in and around New York City.
By 9 p.m., the city had gotten nearly 15,000 calls about storm-related tree damage, including around 8,500 about downed trees and nearly 5,000 about downed limbs, a parks department spokeswoman said.
In some neighborhoods, the branches snapped off trees lining the streets and fell onto cars. Near Washington Square Park in Manhattan, a tree crashed into a parked van in the afternoon. A mile away, in Gramercy Park, entire trees were toppled, with one splitting in half.
Arlene Harrison, the Gramercy Block Association’s president, said she was thankful that no one had been hurt.
“Trees are replaceable,” she said.
Amando Flores, who has been Gramercy Park’s caretaker for 25 years and who was working in the park on Tuesday afternoon, said he had seen one of his favorite trees, a magnolia that he helped plant nearly two decades ago, being uprooted and collapsing.
“It was a sad day for Gramercy Park,” Mr. Flores said.
Later, around 10 p.m., Rosie Iannotta’s windows offered rare bursts of light on 204th Street in Auburndale, Queens, thanks to a generator she had bought after enduring Sandy and other, earlier storms.
Ms. Iannotta, a retired teacher, said a power surge had melted the electrical lines on her block at 1:44 p.m., a terrifying event that she filmed with her phone.
“I was freaking out,” she said. Luckily, she added, no one was hurt. “I’m just glad that everyone was safe.”
As expected, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority also felt the storm’s impact, with some aboveground subway service, the Metro-North Railroad and the Long Island Rail Road suspended temporarily. Service on the Staten Island Ferry was also suspended. At least 55 flights were canceled at Kennedy International Airport, and at least 78 were canceled at La Guardia Airport.
Sarah Feinberg, the transit authority’s interim president, said at an afternoon briefing that she was not sure when full subway service would resume. “As soon as the trees and debris are removed, we’ll obviously be back to full service,” she said.
By late afternoon, the rains brought by the storm had mostly passed through the city, but the stiff winds continued, creating an odd juxtaposition with the suddenly sunny skies. To the south, Patrick O’Hara, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said the agency was tracking reports of at least two tornadoes: one in Strathmere, in South Jersey, and another near Dover, Del.
In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had warned before the storm hit that some inland areas could get up to six inches of rain. Most of the New York City area wound up with less than two, with sections of Rockland and Orange counties getting slightly more, according to the Weather Service.
In a statement issued later, the governor said staff members from various agencies were helping with local response efforts “to ensure communities are safe, transportation is open and that utilities get the power turned back on.”
By 10 p.m., he said, power had been restored to about 80,000 customers across the state, or about 10 percent of those who had lost it.
Among those who were still waiting with no estimated time for when Con Edison would restore their power were residents of about 20 properties operated by the New York City Housing Authority, according to Barbara Brancaccio, an authority spokesman. She said the authority was taking several contingency steps to support tenants without electricity.
Magda Sepulveda, who lives in the Red Hook Houses complex in Brooklyn with her two teenage children, was one of those tenants.
Standing outside her Richards Street building shortly after 9 p.m., she debated whether to go back inside. Most of the building’s windows were dark, including those in the family’s fifth-floor apartment. The streetlights on the block were also out.
Ms. Sepulveda said she had returned home from work at around 5:30 p.m. She climbed the stairs to her apartment using her phone’s flashlight. Both the stairwell and the hallway on her floor were “pitch black,” she said.
As night fell and the apartment began to darken, she and her children left to charge their phones at a corner store, knowing they would eventually have to climb the darkened stairwell again.
Staying with someone else, Ms. Sepulveda said, was “not an option.”
Shortly before 9 p.m., three men standing outside her building said they were waiting for a Con Edison crew to show up. They crossed the street when one of the utility’s emergency trucks arrived, its red lights blinking.
A utility worker told the men that the failure of a nearby transformer had caused the Red Hook outage. But with thousands of customers in Brooklyn without power, he said, “It’s going to be a while” before the power returned.
Lauren Hard, Juliana Kim, Sean Piccoli and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting.
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