Nor'easter No. 2: East Coast readies for more winter weather

Nearly a quarter of a million people were still without power on Monday afternoon after a ferocious Nor'easter hammered the East Coast — and many residents were bracing for round two with a second storm forecast to roll into the region late Tuesday.

By noon, about 244,000 people in Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Delaware, Connecticut and Maine remained without electricity due to last week's storm, according to each state's respective power companies. Earlier in the day, that number was about 424,000 residents.

The Nor'easter also left at least nine people dead, including an 11-year-old and a 6-year-old.

In states like New York, the lack of heat forced some from their homes while others in Massachusetts were forced out by flooding.

"Well the food went bad, and just no lights, no heat. The heat has actually been the worst of it. We might have been able to stay if we had heat," one resident in Hartsdale, New York, told "Today."

Shelters have opened and school has been canceled in some regions with no power.

But as some East Coast states cleared the debris from last Friday's storm and worked to restore power, 33 million people from eastern Pennsylvania to Maine were yet again under a winter storm watch, according to Weather.com and the National Weather Service.



The second Nor'easter is expected to be felt starting Tuesday evening as heavy, wet snow and gusting winds move up the coast. The system is expected to continue into Wednesday and Thursday with heavy snow forecast for the New England area.

Currently, the storm is situated over the Great Plains, making its way east toward the coast.

"It's a storm in the plains now and then later this week that energy gets transferred into a coastal storm and that's our nor'easter," said NBC News meteorologist Sherri Pugh. "That doesn't mean it's bringing blizzard conditions here. It's a different impact in the two regions."

The storm carries the risk of even more downed powerlines and trees and minor to moderate coastal flooding.

"The snow could reach closer to the coast," Pugh said. "It's the kind of snow amounts that could cause travel problems and power outages."

But Pugh said this nor'easter is moving quicker than the last and "hopefully we won't have hours and hours of that high tide flooding."

Although the winter weather is not anticipated to be as strong as the storm that ravaged the East Coast days earlier, it is expected to bring snow to Philadelphia, New York and Boston — areas that mostly saw rain last time.

Big cities could be impacted, but because it's still not clear where cities will receive rain or snow, it's too early to determine how many inches the northeast can expect, Pugh said.

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