Tropical Storm Ophelia brings gusty winds, heavy rains, and road-closing floods to the Shore

The remnants of Tropical Storm Ophelia soaked the entire Philadelphia region with episodic downpours on Saturday, the first day of fall, conspiring to incite 60-mph wind gusts at the Shore and high-tide flooding that closed numerous roads in beach and back-bay towns.

The winds were forecast to continue howling well into the night, and the rains into Sunday night, and perhaps even Monday, and nuisance flooding at the coast the next three days.

“Not a great stretch of weather here,” AccuWeather Inc. senior meteorologist Brett Anderson said with a dash of understatement.

Yet the region has benefitted from some good astronomical fortune. And for all the attention generated by Ophelia — the first named tropical storm of a busy season to make landfall on the Atlantic Coast — a primary driver of the powerful onshore winds was a nameless system to the north.

» READ MORE: Ophelia breaks a streak of tropical storm luck

Those winds — gusting to 60 mph in Cape May and Sea Isle City — sent waters crashing over a bulkhead on Amherst Avenue in Atlantic City on Saturday afternoon about the time of high tide, at 3 p.m. Numerous street floods were reported in Atlantic and Cape May Counties, where earlier the Townsends Inlet Bridge was forced to close due to flooding.

The winds, while backing off some, were due to persist, and the weather service said that was likely to continue to cause issues on the back bays by inhibiting drainage on Sunday.

“It looks like there’s a potential for at least some minor coastal flooding,” said Joe DeSilva a meteorologist at the National Weather Service Office in Mount Holly. “it depends how much water gets stuck in the back bays.” Minor flooding is forecast at high tides at the Shore Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday.

Said Anderson, “With sea-level rise, it doesn’t take much anymore.”

» READ MORE: Rising seas are expected to lead to more flooding

The fact that as much as 3 inches of rain had fallen in the Shore towns hasn’t helped matters.

The rains weren’t quite as heavy and the winds not as brutal on the mainland, but Philadelphia International Airport recorded a gust of 39 mph and just more than an inch of rain as of Saturday night.

Despite all that wind-driven rain, however, only scattered power outages were reported in South Jersey and in Philadelphia and its neighboring Pennsylvania counties.

And the flooding at the Shore might have been considerably worse had all this happened next Friday, when the moon will be full and making one of its closest annual approaches to the earth, adding an extra tug to the tides.

The region also escaped stream and river flooding, despite the downpours, because rainfall generally has been below normal the last 30 days, and parts of region even were in the “abnormally dry” zone in the U.S. Drought Monitor update on Thursday.

Stream and river levels were low heading into the storm, which got underway Friday night at the Shore and early Saturday in the immediate Philadelphia area.

Tropical Storm Ophelia, which became the Atlantic season’s 15th named storm on Friday, drew most of the attention, but the winds were in large measure the result of a potent area or high pressure, or heavier air, anchored over Quebec, said AccuWeather’s Anderson.

The winds were generated by the pressure differences between that high and the low pressure of Ophelia, he said. The Shore and the rest of the region were caught in a kind or air sandwich: Think of air in a punctured tire escaping into the lighter air of the atmosphere.

On Saturday night the winds were losing their ferocity as the remains of Ophelia were in Virginia and weakening. Its leftovers were expected to track across the Philadelphia region sometime Sunday.

Meanwhile, said Anderson, the high, with its clockwise wind circulation “isn’t going anywhere.” Areas to the south of the center experience winds from the east, so those sea breezes may end up hanging around through the workweek.

“Even as we head into Monday it could be a chilly and damp day, although the rain amounts won’t be as great as today,” said AccuWeather’s Dan Pydynowski. “It may take a few days to clear all the moisture in the system out of the area.”

Many events planned for Saturday were storm casualties. The New Hope Arts and Crafts Festival, the St. James Philadelphia Polo Classic, South Philly Sausage Fest, and the Longwood Gardens Wine and Jazz Festival announced cancellations on Friday evening, ahead of the storm. Philadelphia’s Department of Parks and Recreation also announced that on Saturday all outdoor grass fields would close and outdoor children’s sports programs were canceled.

The scheduled 1:05 p.m. start of the Phillies-Mets game Sunday at Citizens Bank Park was pushed back to 6:05, although the weather service saw a better than 75% likelihood of rain through 7 p.m.

But the Phillies and Mets were able to take advantage of a break in the rain to get their game in, despite a howling wind blowing in from right field to left at Citizens Bank Park.

» READ MORE: The weather fiasco the last time the Phillies won it all prompted an MLB rule change

Bryce Harper somehow even managed to hit a wind-defying homer into the upper deck in right. The Phillies even won.

Inquirer staff writers Scott Lauber and Amy S. Rosenberg contributed to this article.

A list of the status of regional events can be found here.