Hurricane Irene swept through Manhattan on Sunday but
reserved the worst of its fury for towns and suburbs up and down the northeast
region where driving rain and flood tides inundated homes and cut power to
millions.
On its march up the East Coast
over the weekend, the storm left at least 15 dead, as many as 3.6 million
customers without electricity, widespread flooding and thousands of downed
trees. It forced the closure of New York's mass transit system, and the cancellation
of thousands of flights.
President Barack Obama warned
that the region's problems were far from over. "Many Americans are still
at risk of power outages and flooding which could get worse in the coming days
as rivers swell past their banks," Obama said, promising federal
government help for recovery efforts.
By late Sunday afternoon,
Irene was bringing tropical storm conditions to the six states of New England,
still packing winds of 60 miles per hour.
It isn't immediately clear how
much Irene will cost but in New Jersey alone, the damage is expected in
"the billions of dollars," Governor Chris Christie told NBC's
"Meet the Press."
With many thousands of
homeowners in the region suffering flooding there will now be many questions
over whether insurance policies offer cover and whether the federal
government's flood program can handle the claims, especially at a time of
austerity in Washington and in cash-strapped states.
New York City's 8.5 million
people are not used to hurricanes and the city is plagued by aging
infrastructure, leading many to issue dire warnings in recent days about what
the hurricane could bring. Authorities had taken unprecedented steps to
prepare, including mandatory evacuations and a total shutdown of mass transit
systems, that will have had a major economic impact.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said
there were no reports of deaths or injuries in the city, though there were some
close calls -- in Staten Island, firefighters with boats had rescued more than
60 people, including 3 babies, from 21 homes flooded with five feet of water, a
fire department spokesman said.
While it weakened before it
hit New York, the swirling storm still packed a wallop, especially in districts
such as the Rockaways peninsula, a low-lying strip of land exposed to the
Atlantic Ocean on the southeastern flank of the city. Authorities closed three
bridges leading to the peninsula before the storm.
"It was like being in the
hull of a ship," said Patricia Keane, 42, who stayed in her Rockaway home
and lost power but then used backup generators to supply electricity to herself
and four neighbors, who all had flooded basements.
On Sunday afternoon, about
370,000 city residents who had been ordered to leave their homes were told they
could return.
Some very limited public
transport was starting to resume with a few bus services running, but the head
of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said it was too soon to say when
the New York subway system would return. Commuter lines that bring many people
into the city from surrounding areas were also still out.
It all means that many who
normally commute into Manhattan and elsewhere in the region will find it very
difficult to get to work on Monday, though financial markets are expected to open as normal, albeit
with reduced volume.
Air travel was expected to
resume on Monday.
"All in all we are in
pretty good shape," Bloomberg said, adding that, while it would be a
"tough commute" on Monday, there had been no long-term damage to the
subway system.
New Jersey, home to hundreds
of thousands of people who travel into New York each day, was hard hit by
flooding, downed trees and power outages. More than 100 dams in the state were
being monitored for spills from high water, and one downstream town, High
Bridge, was evacuated, Christie said.
Bob McDonnell, the governor of
Virginia which was hit earlier by the Hurricane, told CNN "We prepared for
the worst but came out a little better than expected. Unfortunately now, four
fatalities have been confirmed,"
"We've got some
significant damage in some areas, from flooding, from wind, a lot of trees
down, 2.5 million people or more without power in Virginia, that's the second
largest outage in history," he said.
In North Carolina, where
authorities confirmed at least six storm-related deaths since the hurricane
made landfall on Saturday, Governor Bev Perdue was expected to request a
federal disaster declaration.
The storm dumped up to eight
inches of rain on the Washington region, but the capital avoided major damage.
As the storm moved north on
Sunday, New England officials reported flooded roadways, trees downed over rail
tracks and evacuations in some towns.
The storm zone stretched from
Massachusetts' eastern islands of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket to the
western Berkshires mountain range, where authorities braced for dam failures
because of the heavy rains.
SIGH OF RELIEF
In Manhattan, where some had
predicted massive flooding in the financial district, there was about a foot of
water in the streets at the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan before the
tide began receding mid-morning.
Jeremy Corley, a 32-year-old
web manager, was out in shorts and a rain jacket at the Seaport on Sunday
morning. "I was watching the news on TV and they were way
over-exaggerating how bad it is so I wanted to go outside and check it
out," he said.
Nearby, a man was walking his
two dogs through water that came up to the bellies of his pets. A mile or so
further north, a man was seen kayaking in the street, though the water was not
very deep and a cyclist was able to make his way along the same street.
Wall Street's financial
district seemed largely unaffected as did Ground Zero, where the 10th
anniversary of the September 11 attacks is soon to be observed.
The impact was felt harder on
Long Island. The waves at Long Beach, which faces the Atlantic Ocean, crested
up over the boardwalk and onto the streets, taking with them a two-story
life-guard station.
Jim Nolan, a 55-year-old
architect, had a busy night at his Copiague home on the shore of a lagoon on
the south shore of Long Island. He was keeping watch on his 34-foot cabin
cruiser tied to a dock by a number of lines that broke during the night.
"About 3 O'clock two snapped, two snapped about 4 or 5 o'clock and one
snapped half an hour ago," Nolan said. "It was nice and warm so I put
my bathing suit on and went out there to work on it with my son," Nolan
said.
After Irene, weather watchers
were keeping an eye on Tropical Storm Jose, which formed near Bermuda.
This year has been one of the
most extreme for weather in U.S. history, with $35 billion in losses so far
from floods, tornadoes and heat waves.
(Additional reporting by Pascal
Fletcher in Miami; Joe
Rauch and Jim Brumm in Wilmington, N.C.; Tom Hals in Delaware; Claudia
Parsons, Basil Katz, Edith Honan, Phil Wahba, Clare Baldwin,
Jonathan Allen and Ernest Scheyder in New York; Alistair Bell, Malahti Nayak,
Andy Sullivan, David Morgan and Lisa Lambert in Washington; Andrea Shalal-Esa
in Ocean City; Michael Fitzpatrick in Long Branch, New Jersey; Grant McCool in
Toms River, New Jersey; Writing by Claudia Parsons; Editing by Jackie Frank, Martin Howell)
Source : Reuters
EmpireMoney.com
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