'Fully Loaded Super Soaker': Both Coasts Being Battered by Big Storms

Florida got 5½ inches of snow Wednesday morning - and so did many other cities in the Northeast (Florida is a town of about 675 people in northwestern Massachusetts) as a nor'easter that has already caused wind and flood damage picked up fresh energy on its way to Canada.

Meanwhile, in drought-stricken California, schools were closing and residents were locking up ahead of a storm that the National Weather Service said could turn out to be one of the biggest in five years.

The nor'easter along the Atlantic coast mainly dropped buckets of rain Wednesday on Northeast cities like New York, Philadelphia and Washington, delaying about 200 takeoffs and landings at those cites' airports and canceling about 100 flights. But farther north, places like Delanson and Lake Placid in New York and Killington, Vermont, got more than a foot of wet, heavy snow. Jamesville, New York, led the way at 20 inches. Storm winds with gusts above 60 mph are likely to cause power failures for upstate and central New York into central and eastern Pennsylvania through Wednesday night, according to The Weather Channel.

In the West, some schools in the San Francisco Bay area were already being shut down for the rest of the week in the face of threatened floods, rock slides, mud slides and ground debris accompanying a Pacific storm that could drop the most rain on California since 2009. Three to 5 inches is expected in northern parts of the state by late Thursday, with more than an inch forecast in Southern California beginning Friday.

Full coverage on NBC Bay Area

The West Coast storm is colorfully called the Pineapple Express. That's 'a river of moisture in the atmosphere that basically originates around Hawaii, and it's like a fully loaded Super Soaker that just unloads on California for a couple of days straight,' said Ari Sarsalari, a meteorologist for The Weather Channel.

Like the Northeast storm, the Express was chugging along with high winds gusting over 50 mph, also with the likelihood of downed trees and power failures.

At least 24,000 customers were without power Wednesday in Western Washington as the wind and rain hit the Pacific Northwest coast and began moving south, NBC station KING reported.

IN-DEPTH SOCIAL - M. Alex Johnson

First published December 10 2014, 1:55 PM