The slow-rolling system named Henri is taking its time drenching the Northeast with rain, lingering early Monday atop a region made swampy by the storm’s relentless downpour. Henri, which made landfall as a tropical storm Sunday afternoon in Rhode Island, has moved northwest through Connecticut. It hurled rain westward far before its arrival, flooding areas as far southwest as New Jersey before pelting northeast Pennsylvania, even as it took on tropical depression status. Read:Hurricane Henri closes in as the Northeast braces for impact Over 140,000 homes lost power, and deluges of rain closed bridges, swamped roads and left some people stranded in their vehicles. Beach towns from the Hamptons on Long Island to Cape Cod in Massachusetts exhaled from being spared the worst of the potential damage Sunday. Other areas of New England awaited the storm’s return. The National Hurricane Center said Henri is expected to slow down further and likely stall near the Connecticut-New York state line, before moving back east through New England and eventually pushing out to the Atlantic Ocean. Henri could produce 3 to 6 inches (8 to 15 centimeters) of rainfall over portions of Long Island, New England, southeast New York, New Jersey, and northeast Pennsylvania through Monday, the agency projects. Parts of northern New Jersey into southern New York could see up to a foot of rain, leading to considerable flash flooding, it said. New England officials fretted that just a few more inches of precipitation would be a back breaker following a summer of record rainfall. “The ground is so saturated that it can flood with just another inch of rain,” Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont warned late Sunday. Read: Coastal evacuations urged as Hurricane Henri heads north In the central New Jersey community of Helmetta, some 200 residents fled for higher ground, taking refuge in hotels or with friends and family, as flood waters inundated their homes Sunday. “It came so quick — in the blink of an eye,” said the town’s mayor, Christopher Slavicek, whose parents were spending the night after fleeing their home. “Now there’s clean up. So this is far from over.” President Joe Biden has declared disasters in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, opening the purse strings for federal recovery aid to those states. “We’re doing everything we can now to help those states prepare, respond and recover,” said the president, who also offered condolences Sunday to Tennessee residents, after severe flooding from an unrelated storm killed at least 22 people and left dozens missing. When Henri made landfall near Westerly, Rhode Island, it had sustained winds of about 60 mph (97 kph) and gusts of up to 70 mph (110 kph). Some communities in central New Jersey were inundated with as much as 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain by midday Sunday. In Jamesburg, television video footage showed flooded downtown streets and cars almost completely submerged. In Newark, Public Safety Director Brian O’Hara said police and firefighters rescued 86 people in 11 incidents related to the storm. In Connecticut, about 250 residents from four nursing homes on the shoreline had to be relocated to other facilities. Several major bridges in Rhode Island were briefly shuttered Sunday, and some coastal roads were nearly impassable. Read:New England preps for 1st hurricane in 30 years with Henri Other communities awaited for sunrise to survey the damage already wrought. Linda Orlomoski, of Canterbury, Connecticut, was among those without power late into Sunday. “It’s supposed to get nasty hot and humid again on Tuesday,” she said. “If we still have no power by then, that will be miserable.”

Tensions have been growing over the slow pace of aid reaching victims of a powerful weekend earthquake that killed more than 2,100 people in Haiti and was trailed by a drenching tropical depression. At the small airport in the southwestern community of Les Cayes, throngs of people gathered outside the fence on Wednesday when an aid flight arrived and crews began loading boxes into waiting trucks. One of a small squad of Haitian national police, outfitted in military-style uniforms and posted at the airport to guard the aid shipments, fired two warnings shots to disperse a group of young men. Angry crowds also massed at collapsed buildings in the city, demanding tarps to create temporary shelters after Tropical Storm Grace brought heavy rain at the beginning of the week. Read:Death toll from Haiti’s weekend earthquake rises to 1,941 Haiti’s Civil Protection Agency late Wednesday raised the number of deaths from the earthquake to 2,189 from an earlier count of 1,941 and said 12,268 people were injured. Dozens of people are still missing. The magnitude 7.2 earthquake destroyed more than 7,000 homes and damaged more than 12,000, leaving about 30,000 families homeless, according to official estimates. Schools, offices and churches also were demolished or badly damaged. The Caribbean nation’s southwest region was the hardest hit. One of the first food deliveries by local authorities — a couple dozen boxes of rice and pre-measured, bagged meal kits — reached a tent encampment set up in one of the poorest areas of Les Cayes, where most of the one-story, cinderblock, tin-roofed homes were damaged or destroyed by Saturday’s quake. But the shipment was clearly insufficient for the hundreds who have lived under tents and tarps for five days. “It’s not enough, but we’ll do everything we can to make sure everybody gets at least something,” said Vladimir Martino, a resident of the camp who took charge of the distribution. Gerda Francoise, 24, was one of dozens who lined up in the wilting heat in hopes of receiving food. “I don’t know what I’m going to get, but I need something to take back to my tent,” said Francoise. “I have a child.” International aid workers on the ground said hospitals in the worst-hit areas are mostly incapacitated and that there is a desperate need for medical equipment. But the government told at least one foreign organization that has been operating in the country for nearly three decades that it did not need assistance from hundreds of its medical volunteers. Prime Minister Ariel Henry said Wednesday that his administration twill work to not “repeat history on the mismanagement and coordination of aid,” a reference to the chaos that followed the country’s devastating 2010 earthquake, when the government was accused of not getting all of the money raised by donors to the people who needed it. Read: What makes Haiti prone to devastating earthquakes Meanwhile, the Core Group, a coalition of key international diplomats from the United States and other nations that monitors Haiti, said in a statement that its members are “resolutely committed to working alongside national and local authorities to ensure that impacted people and areas receive adequate assistance as soon as possible.” Aid has slowly trickled in to help the thousands who were left homeless. But distributing it under current conditions will be challenging. “We are planning a meeting to start clearing all of the sites that were destroyed, because that will give the owner of that site at least the chance to build something temporary, out of wood, to live on that site,” said Serge Chery, head of civil defense for the Southern Province, which covers Les Cayes. “It will be easier to distribute aid if people are living at their addresses, rather than in a tent.” Chery said that an estimated 300 people are still missing in the area. The U.S. Geological Survey said a preliminary analysis of satellite imagery after the earthquake revealed hundreds of landslides. While some officials have suggested that the search phase has to end and heavy machinery should be called in to clear rubble, Henry appeared unwilling to move to that stage. “Some of our citizens are still under the debris. We have teams of foreigners and Haitians working on it,” he said. He also appealed for unity: “We have to put our heads together to rebuild Haiti.” “The country is physically and mentally destroyed,” Henry said. Read: Rescuers racing in Haiti as storm threatens to follow quake Dr. Barth Green, president and co-founder of Project Medishare, an organization that has worked in Haiti since 1994 to improve health services, said he was hopeful the U.S. military would establish a field hospital in the affected area. “The hospitals are all broken and collapsed, the operating rooms aren’t functional, and then if you bring tents, it’s hurricane season, they can blow right away,” Green said. Green noted that his organization has “hundreds of medical volunteers, but the Haitian government tells us they don’t need them.” Nonetheless, the organization was deploying along with others.

Eight children in a van from a youth home for abused or neglected children were killed in a fiery multi-vehicle crash on a wet interstate that also killed a man and his baby in another vehicle, the most devastating blow from a tropical depression that claimed 13 lives in Alabama as it caused flash floods and spurred tornadoes that destroyed dozens of homes. The crash happened Saturday about 35 miles (55 kilometers) south of Montgomery on Interstate 65 after vehicles likely hydroplaned on wet roads, said Butler County Coroner Wayne Garlock. The van, containing children ages 4 to 17, belonged to the Tallapoosa County Girls Ranch, a youth home operated by the Alabama Sheriffs Association. Michael Smith, the youth ranches CEO, said the van was heading back to the ranch near Camp Hill, northeast of Montgomery, after a week at the beach in Gulf Shores. It caught fire after the wreck and Candice Gulley, the ranch director, was the van’s only survivor — pulled from the flames by a bystander. Gulley remained hospitalized Sunday in Montgomery in serious but stable condition. “She’s going to survive her physical injuries,” Smith said. Two of the dead in the van were Gulley’s children, ages 4 and 16. Four others were ranch residents and two were guests, Smith said. Read:Driver rams cyclists in Arizona race, critically injuring 6 “This is the worst tragedy I’ve been a part of in my life,” said Smith, who drove Sunday to the ranch to talk to the remaining residents, who had returned from Gulf Shores in a separate van and did not see the wreck. “Words cannot explain what I saw,” Smith said of the accident site, which he visited Saturday. “We love these girls like they’re our own children.” The crash also claimed the lives of two other people who were in a separate vehicle. Garlock identified them as 29-year-old Cody Fox and his 9-month-old daughter, Ariana, both of Marion County, Tennessee. “He was a great guy and we’re really gonna miss him,” said Aaron Sanders, who worked with Fox at the emergency management agency in Marion County. He said Fox also ran a hot tub business with his father and doted on his daughter. “He just loved her to death and that was his life.” Multiple people were also injured. The National Transportation Safety Board tweeted that it was sending 10 investigators to the area Sunday to investigate the crash, photos of which showed at least four burned vehicles, including two large trucks. It said the inquiry would focus on vehicle technologies such as forward collision warning systems, fuel tank integrity and occupant survivability. Meanwhile, a 24-year-old man and a 3-year-old boy were also killed Saturday when a tree fell on their house just outside the Tuscaloosa city limits, said Capt. Jack Kennedy of the Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes Unit. Makayla Ross, a 23-year-old Fort Payne woman, died Saturday after her car ran off the road into a swollen creek, DeKalb County Deputy Coroner Chris Thacker told WHNT-TV. The deaths occurred as drenching rains from Tropical Depression Claudette pelted northern Alabama and Georgia late Saturday. As much as 12 inches (30 centimeters) of rain was reported earlier from Claudette along the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Flash flood watches were posted Sunday for eastern Georgia, the southern two-thirds of South Carolina and the North Carolina coast. A tropical storm warning was in effect in North Carolina from the Little River Inlet to the town of Duck on the Outer Banks. A tropical storm watch was issued from South Santee River, South Carolina, to the Little River Inlet, forecasters said. WBRC-TV reported that search efforts were also under way for a man believed to have fallen into the water during flash flooding in Birmingham. Crews were using boats to search Pebble Creek. Garlock said the location of the multi-vehicle wreck is “notorious” for hydroplaning, as the northbound highway curves down a hill to a small creek. Traffic on that stretch of I-65 is usually filled with vacationers driving to and from Gulf of Mexico beaches on summer weekends. Read:Driver crashes into crowd at Pride parade in Florida; 1 dead “Butler County has had one of the most terrible traffic accidents,” county Sheriff Danny Bond wrote on Facebook. The Tallapoosa County school system said counselors would be available Sunday at the 225-student Reeltown High School, where some of the ranch residents were students. Smith said the ranch, which is Christian-based, would likely have a memorial service later, asking for prayers as he began to cry. A GoFundMe account was set up for Tallapoosa County Girls Ranch to help offset the costs of funeral expenses, medical costs for the injured and counseling for those impacted. Gulley had worked with children for years, beginning when she and her husband were house parents at the ranch for seven years. “During those years, there have been 74 girls that have come through our house and called us mom and dad,” she told the Opelika-Auburn News in August 2019. She said she then became a relief parent, working on fundraising and being involved in the community, before she became the ranch director. “My heart goes out to the loved ones of all who perished,” Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey said in a statement. Claudette was beginning to re-strengthen late Sunday, with the National Hurricane Center reporting top winds at 35 mph (55 kph) in a nighttime advisory. The depression was expected to return to tropical storm status Monday over eastern North Carolina before heading out to sea in the Atlantic Ocean. The center of Claudette’s disorganized circulation was located about 65 miles (100 kilometers) northeast of Columbia, South Carolina. It was moving east-northeast at 20 mph (31 kph), the National Hurricane Center said. Aside from rainy weather, it seemed to be business as usual along North Carolina’s Outer Banks on Sunday. At Ace Hardware in Avon, shift manager David Swartwood said they were preparing for whatever might come, but the overall sense was that it wouldn’t be that bad in that area. He said winds from the south don’t usually cause huge flooding problems, so “we don’t really anticipate any bad scenarios.” “Everybody here has been through it many, many times, so we’re used to the drill,” he said. “We’ve been prepared.” Read:Fierce Capitol attacks on police in newly released videos For the hardware store, he said, that means having supplies like flashlights, batteries, tarps, generators, ropes and sandbags on hand. As of Sunday morning, there wasn’t a huge rush. At Stack ’em High in Kill Devil Hills, a restaurant that specializes in pancakes, co-owner Dawn Kiousis said Sunday morning restaurant service was busy. “We’re serving just like normal,” she said. “You keep your eye on the weather and you prepare as much stuff in advance as you can,” she said. “Just know she’s gonna win. Mother Nature is going to do what she’s going to do, so you just prepare.”