(Reuters) - The U.S. East Coast remained under the threat of menacing weather on Wednesday as a powerful winter storm loomed across the region after leaving in its wake power outages, grounded flights and several towns swamped with flood waters.
More than 50 million people from eastern Ohio up through the Mid-Atlantic and into the Northeast were under high wind and flooding advisories on Wednesday, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.
Flooding swamped several New England coastal towns including Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, video footage posted on social media showed. Flood waters inundated streets, crept up to homes and businesses and submerged vehicles, causing officials in the beach town of 2,500 to declare an emergency and order evacuations.
"An emergency has been declared as a result of extremely high seas and flooding," Hampton Police Department said on X. "If you live in the area we recommend you temporarily leave the area for higher ground."
Major cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Boston were also expected to see potentially damaging gusts of more than 50 miles (80 km) per hour that could take down trees and powerlines during the afternoon and evening, the NWS said.
Some 300,000 homes and businesses from North Carolina to Maine were without power on Wednesday afternoon, Poweroutage.us reported.
The storm also caused more than 1,200 flights to be delayed or canceled as of Wednesday afternoon, including more than 270 flights in and out of Chicago, according to Flightaware.com.
The storm was already responsible for at least three deaths in Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia, where high winds and several tornadoes ripped through parts of the South, according to authorities and local media reports.
Two motorists were also killed in Wisconsin and Michigan, where heavy snow fell across the region, causing treacherous driving conditions, local media reported.
A separate winter storm was expected to continue during the day in the Pacific Northwest, where many communities in higher elevations were expected to get blizzard-like conditions.