Vicious winds were tearing through the Tri-State area on Monday morning, taking down trees, power lines and cutting power to hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses, and wreaking havoc on travel at area airports.

Wind gusts of hurricane force — 74 mph — or higher were reported around the region, including West Virginia and New York. Wind gusts topped 60 mph in the New York City area, and are expected to last all day Monday.

LaGuardia Airport ordered a full ground stop just after 8:00AM as 47 mph gusts tore through; the full stop lasted about an hour. By mid-morning, Newark Liberty International Airport, which recorded a gust of 56 mph, had implemented a traffic management program that was causing average inbound delays of more than 3.5 hours.

Passengers are advised to check with their airlines for updates.

Wind gusts topping 60 mph could “cause flying debris, turn unsecured objects into projectiles and cause power outages,” according to a high wind warning issued by the National Weather Service.

Before dawn, high winds had already been blamed for a downed pole and wires in the heart of midtown Manhattan, jamming traffic near 34th Street as the Monday morning rush got underway.

The wind peeled off roofs in places. In Syracuse, New York, scaffolding blown off a building knocked down power lines.

Giant chunks of ice spilled over the banks of the Niagara River across from Buffalo on Sunday, creating a jagged, frosty barrier between the river and a scenic road.

Dramatic footage captured by park police in Ontario showed the massive chunks roiling onto shore. High winds had raised water levels on the eastern end of Lake Erie in a phenomenon known as a seiche and then, according to the New York Power Authority, driven ice over a boom upstream from the river.

@NiagParksPolice advising that @NiagaraParks Roads Department closing Niagara River Parkway near Mathers Arch. Strong winds blowing ice over the retaining wall from the lake. Drive with caution. Video courtesy @NiagRegPolice Insp. Garvey…. pic.twitter.com/RdXh5HYxfx

— Niagara Parks Police (@NiagParksPolice) February 24, 2019

Ice mounds 25 to 30 feet high also came ashore farther south, piling up on several lakefront properties in suburban Hamburg.

“We’ve had storms in the past, but nothing like this,” resident Dave Schultz told WGRZ. “We’ve never had the ice pushed up against the walls and right up onto our patios. … It’s in my patio, the neighbor’s patio, and the patio after that.”

A voluntary evacuation for the area was issued Sunday.

A motorist in Sandusky, Ohio, captured video of a tractor-trailer flipping over on a bridge .

Empty tractor-trailers and empty tandem trucks have been banned on some highways. Trucks were also banned on some bridges in New York City, where the winds sent litter swirling in the canyons between skyscrapers and rocked sidewalk food carts precariously.

Wind advisories and warnings were in effect through Monday in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast up to northern New England.

(AP / YWN World Headquarters – NYC)