Strong winds and heavy rains battered Massachusetts Wednesday night, flooding area roadways, including a ramp in the Ted Williams Tunnel in Boston, and leading to scattered power outages Thursday morning.
The storm dumped more than 4 inches of rain in Attleboro while more than 3 inches fell in several communities across Eastern Massachusetts, including 3.08 inches of rain at Fenway Park, according to the National Weather Service.
The rain flooded an Interstate 90 westbound ramp from Logan International Airport as it connects to Interstate 93, closing it temporarily while crews drained it, according to the state Transportation Department. The ramp reopened around midnight, officials said.
Videos on social media showed drivers trying to navigate the flooded tunnel.
Boston resident Maria Barajas, 32, was in an Uber with her fiancé and a friend traveling from the Seaport to the Liberty Hotel when they drove into the flooded tunnel.
Cars had to drive “in a single file line on the left side” of the roadway where the water was not so high, she wrote in an Instagram message. The driver slowed way down to make sure the car wouldn’t stall out in the floodwaters.
“Thankfully everything was okay,” said Barajas, who shared video of the swamped tunnel with the Globe. “I have never seen [a] flood in the tunnel, it was my first time. So it was definitely a new experience.”
MassDOT spokesperson Marshall P. Hook said the high volume of rain pushed debris in the tunnel onto the storm drains, clogging them. At the same time, pumps that are supposed to drain water from the tunnel failed for reasons that were not immediately clear, he said.
The agency is working to identify what caused the pump failure, he said.
The heavy rains led the Boston Public Health Commission to issue a public health alert Thursday warning the public to avoid contact with some bodies of water for at least 48 hours “due to increased health risks.” Large storms can overwhelm combined sewer systems causing a mix of rain and wastewater to discharge into local waters, according to the commission.
Combine sewer overflows occurred in the Fort Point Channel near West Fourth Street, affecting the Fort Point Channel and downtown waterfront, the lower Inner Harbor, and the Jeffries Point area of East Boston, the agency said.
Another overflow, into the Charles River Basin upstream of the Boston University Bridge in Allston, affected the river basin downstream to the Inner Harbor, while a discharge into the Charles River in Charlestown near Prison Point will affect both the river and the Inner Harbor.
“We put out a public health warning about combined sewer overflow which occurs after a large storm overwhelms the sewerage system. The public should avoid contact with affected bodies of water for at least 48 hours due to increased health risks,” the agency wrote on X Thursday morning.
In Brockton, firefighters performed a water rescue after a car was caught in flooding on Westgate Drive, the department posted on X.
Firefighters also had to wade through chest-deep waters to help a man who had overdosed at a homeless encampment off Westgate Drive, which is flood-prone, officials said.
“Narcan was administered and the patient was extricated through swift water due to the heavy rain. Firefighters used water exposure suits & safety ropes to safely remove the man,” the department posted.
Along with torrential rain, wind gusts across the region surpassed 50 miles per hour, reaching more than 60 miles per hour in Plymouth and Barnstable counties, according to the weather service.
Hundreds of electric customers on the South Shore were without power the morning after the storm, including more than 500 in Plymouth County as of about 10 a.m. Thursday, according to the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency’s outage map.
Most of those outages were in Scituate and Hanover, where nearly 250 customers were waiting for the power to come back on. Outages were also reported in Marshfield, Duxbury, Cohasset, Norwell, Brockton, Plymouth, Wareham, Hanson, and Halifax.
The storm also brought down trees and power lines in some areas south of Boston. The National Weather Service reported a tree had fallen onto a house in Hingham on Wednesday afternoon. Downed trees were also reported in Plymouth, Norwood, and Swansea, according to the weather service.
Due to a reporting error, an earlier version of this story misidentified the highway impacted by flooding Wednesday night. This is a developing story and will be updated as soon as more information becomes available.
John R. Ellement can be reached at john.ellement@globe.com. Follow him @JREbosglobe. Nick Stoico can be reached at nick.stoico@globe.com.