The winds were howling so much in Washington DC on Friday that flight controllers at Dulles International Airport had to temporarily evacuate their tower, which suspended flight operations. Conditions weren't much better on board the airplanes themselves. A Canadair Regional Jet reported, after it landed at the same airport with about 50 passengers, that "pretty much everyone on the plane threw up."

Up the coast, conditions were even more severe, as New England residents had to deal not only with severe winds, but major coastal flooding as well. Boston is no stranger to a good nor'easter, of course, but the storm now bearing down on the Eastern United States is especially brutal by historical standards in terms of winds and coastal flooding. It also happens to be the second such powerful nor'easter that has wracked the US East Coast in just two months.

For much of the 20th century, the Northeastern Blizzard of 1978 set the benchmark for extreme snowfall and flooding. During this storm, the tidal gauge in Boston Harbor measured a record 15.1 feet. The extreme "bomb cyclone" storm that afflicted the Eastern United States in January of this year recorded a mark of 15.16 feet in Boston, eclipsing the record.

Conditions improve this weekend

At high tide today, the latest nor'easter reached 14.67 feet in Boston Harbor, according to the local National Weather Service office. That is already the third highest tide on record, and forecasters expected a tide of 14.9 feet or higher at around midnight.

Both the January storm and this week's nor'easter are justifiably being called "bomb cyclones," a term that refers to a system that has undergone "bombogenesis." In meteorological terms, this occurs when the central pressure of a storm, a key indicator of its strength, drops 24 millibars in 24 hours.

The ferocious seas off #Scituate. Thanks MA Coastal Coalition for sending the video. pic.twitter.com/wuCim4RqON — Robert Goulston (@rgoulston) March 2, 2018

High tides and heavy winds gusting up to 80mph were playing havoc with much of the Northeastern United States on Friday. LaGuardia Airport was closed in New York, as were many other airports. Amtrak suspended service for many of its routes. And hundreds of thousands of people were without power. The storm was expected to move away from the Northeastern United States on Saturday, with correspondingly improving conditions expected later in the weekend.