46 dead, millions without power, transit after Sandy

As New York City and New Jersey slowly began digging out Tuesday, the scale of the devastation of Superstorm Sandy became heartbreakingly apparent, leaving 46 people dead and authorities with an enormous undertaking to restore power and transit for millions of others.

1. New in this version

   • 46 people killed
   • Storm danger spreads north and south

"That recovery is a mammoth job," New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday evening, assessing the scope of a once-in-a-generation hurricane that swept homes into the ocean, flooded large swaths of coastal areas, left millions of people without power and crippled transportation.

Sandy by the numbers

1. NBC News special report

   Contributing to this report were Chris Clackum, Bill Dedman, Jay Gray, Ian Johnston, Justin Kirschner, Shawna Thomas and Brittany Tom of NBC News; The Weather Channel; Telemundo Puerto Rico; and NBC stations NBC 4 in New York, NBC 10 in Philadelphia, NBC Connecticut in Hartford, WBIR of Knoxville, Tenn., WBOY of Clarksburg, W.Va., WCMH of Columbus, Ohio, and WVIR of Charlottesville, Va. Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook.

President Barack Obama declared major disasters in New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut, promising that the federal government would do all it could to help local authorities cope with damage. The president was scheduled to visit damaged areas in New Jersey on Wednesday, the White House said.

BreakingNews.com's coverage of Sandy

Details of the devastation became clearer late Tuesday after authorities made their way through severely damaged areas across 20 states stretching from New England to Tennessee:

• Forty-six people had been killed in the U.S., 23 of them in New York ? including 18 in New York City, NBC News reported. Six people had been killed in New Jersey, as well as? five in Pennsylvania; four in Connecticut; two apiece in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia; and one each in North Carolina and Puerto Rico. Before it made its way north, Sandy was blamed for 68 other deaths in the Caribbean.
• More than 6 million homes and businesses were without electricity, about half of them in New York and New Jersey. That number represents individual structures, including large businesses, meaning the number of people without light, heat or refrigeration is likely much higher.
• More than 18,000 flights have been canceled so far, and New York City's airports remained closed Tuesday. Amtrak canceled all of its Northeast Corridor rail service, in addition to some other lines.
• Subway service was unlikely to resume for four to five days, Bloomberg said, but free bus service had resumed on a Saturday schedule, and about 4,000 cabs were running on city streets. PATH train service between Manhattan and New Jersey is likely to be suspended for seven to 10 days, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said.
• The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said the South Ferry subway station was "flooded up to the ceiling," while each tube of the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel ? better known as the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel ? was filled with 43 million gallons of water.
• At least four towns in north New Jersey were submerged by up to 6 feet of water after a levee broke.
• A half-dozen nuclear power plants were shut down or otherwise affected, while the nation's oldest facility declared a rare "alert" after the record storm surge pushed flood waters high enough to endanger a key cooling system.
• Major U.S. stock exchanges were closed Tuesday for a second day, but they planned to reopen Wednesday.

Sandy leaves NYC subway system, infrastructure licking its wounds

In Breezy Point, a seaside community in Queens, N.Y., a massive fire of undetermined origin destroyed at least 110 homes and damaged 20 others. Firefighters had difficulty reaching the blaze because of the severe weather.

"To describe it as looking like pictures we've seen of the end of World War II is not overstating it," Bloomberg said. "The area was completely leveled. Chimneys and foundations were all that was left of many of these homes."

It remained impossible to put a dollar value on Sandy's destruction. Insured losses alone will run from $7 billion to $15 billion, according to an estimate published late Tuesday by AIR Worldwide, a catastrophe modeling firm.

"I think the losses will be almost incalculable," Christie said on NBC's TODAY show.

Video: NYC flooded by record storm surge (on this page)

Even as attention was riveted on New York and New Jersey, Sandy had already moved on, remaining a dangerous storm as it dispersed north and south.

Get live coverage on the storm from Weather.com

About 90,000 customers were without power Tuesday in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec, the Energy Ministry said. At least one death was reported in Toronto after a woman in her 50s was hit in the head by a sign Monday night, NBC News Channel reported.

Sandy hit the mountains of West Virginia and North Carolina with full-blown blizzards, part of a storm-generated snow system stretching as far west as Kentucky and Ohio, where several inches of snow fell in Champaign County.

Officials said the 14 to 16 inches that blanketed Newfound Gap, on the Tennessee-North Carolina line, was believed to be biggest October snowfall on record. Parts of eastern Virginia were under a blizzard warning through Wednesday morning, with snowfall at 1 to 2 inches an hour expected.

'The worst that we have ever experienced'
Tuesday's disaster declarations for New York City, New Jersey and Connecticut mean federal funds will be available to people affected by the storm.

"This was a devastating storm, maybe the worst that we have ever experienced," Bloomberg said, adding that schools would remained closed Wednesday.

The historic storm, which made landfall at 6:45 p.m. ET Monday, hurled a wall of water up to 13 feet high at the Northeast coast. It surged into Lower Manhattan and areas of Brooklyn, submerging entire streets and parks. A record tide of 13.88 feet was set at The Battery in Lower Manhattan on Monday night, breaking the previous record of 11.2 feet in 1821.

Slideshow: Sandy slams into East Coast (on this page)

The powerful storm flooded sections of Atlantic City and other areas of the New Jersey shore. Part of the Atlantic City boardwalk was washed away.

Atlantic City's casinos, which were closed Sunday afternoon, may not reopen until Thursday, officials said. Although they sustained only minor damage, the flooding and heavy damage to surrounding infrastructure means employees and customers can't get to them.

Officials estimated that the casinos alone are losing $5 million every day they're shuttered.

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Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/49605748/ns/weather/

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New York paralyzed as Sandy slams into eastern U.S.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Sandy, one of the biggest storms ever to hit the United States, battered the nation's eastern seaboard on Tuesday, swamping New York City streets with record levels of floodwater, blacking out power to millions of people and bringing transportation to a halt through much of the region.

At least 13 people were reported killed in the United States by Sandy, which dropped just below hurricane status before going ashore in New Jersey on Monday, according to officials and media reports. More than 1 million people across a dozen states were under orders to evacuate as the massive system continued to plow westward.

One disaster forecasting company predicted economic losses could ultimately reach $20 billion, only half insured.

The storm also slowed the presidential campaign at a key time ahead of next week's vote and closed U.S. markets for two days.

Sandy, which was especially imposing because of its wide-raging winds, brought a record surge of almost 14 feet to downtown Manhattan, well above the previous record of 10 feet during Hurricane Donna in 1960, the National Weather Service said.

Water poured into the subway system and tunnels that run under the rivers around Manhattan, raising concerns that the world's financial capital could be hobbled for days to come.

"Hitting at high tide, the strongest surge and the strongest winds all hit at the worst possible time," said Jeffrey Tongue, meteorologist for the weather service in Brookhaven, New York.

Hurricane-force winds as high as 90 miles per hour were recorded, he said.

"Hopefully it's a once-in-a-lifetime storm," Tongue said.

Large sections of New York City were in darkness without power and transportation in the metropolitan area was at a standstill.

"In 108 years our employees have never faced a challenge like the one that confronts us now," Metropolitan Transportation Authority Chairman Joseph Lhota said in a statement.

It could take anywhere from 14 hours to four days to get the water out of the flooded subway tunnels, the MTA said.

"The damage has been geographically very widespread throughout the entire subway, bus, LIRR (Long Island Railroad) and Metro North system, MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said.

50-PLUS HOMES BURN

The unprecedented flooding was hampering efforts to fight a massive fire in one of the city's barrier island neighborhoods, Breezy Point in the borough Queens, the New York Fire Department said. More than 170 firefighters battled a fire that destroyed more than 50 homes.

Two people were reported dead in New York City - a man in a house hit by a tree and a woman who stepped into an electrified puddle of water. Two other people were killed in suburban Westchester County, north of New York City, and a motor vehicle death in Massachusetts was blamed in part on the bad weather.

Two others were killed in Maryland in storm-related incidents, state authorities said, and deaths also were reported in Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, CNN said.

Toronto police also recorded one death - a woman hit by flying debris.

Some 6.8 million people in several states were left without electrical power by the storm, which crashed ashore late on Monday near the gambling resort of Atlantic City, New Jersey.

In New Jersey, Exelon Corp declared an alert around its Oyster Creek nuclear power plant because of rising waters, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. Officials said if waters rose further, they might be forced to use emergency water supplies to cool spent uranium fuel rods.

An alert-level incident, the second-lowest of four action levels, means there's a "potential substantial degradation in the level of safety" at a reactor.

The storm's wind field stretched from South Carolina north to the Canadian border and from West Virginia to a point in the Atlantic Ocean halfway to Bermuda, easily one of the largest ever seen, the National Hurricane Center said.

Heavy snow fell in higher elevations of the Appalachian Mountain inland, and the population centers of Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., were in the slow-moving storm's path.

In New York, a crane partially collapsed and dangled from a 90-story luxury apartment building under construction in midtown Manhattan, and authorities evacuated residents in the area out of fear that high winds would bring the entire rig down.

Much of the city was deserted, as its subways, buses, commuter trains, bridges and airports were closed.

Neighborhoods along the East and Hudson rivers were underwater, as were low-lying streets near Ground Zero, where the World Trade Center once stood.

Power and back-up generators failed at New York University Hospital, forcing patients to be moved elsewhere for care.

In lower Manhattan, firefighters used inflatable orange boats to rescue utility workers stranded for three hours by rising floodwaters inside a power substation.

One of the Con Ed workers pulled from the floodwater, Angelo Amato, said he was part of a crew who had offered to work through the storm.

"This is what happens when you volunteer," he said.

MARKETS, CAMPAIGN IMPACTED

Trees were downed across the region, falling debris closed a major bridge in Boston and floodwater and gusts of wind buffeted coastal towns such as Fairfield, Connecticut, home to many commuters into New York City.

With eight days to go before the election, President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney canceled scheduled campaign events and acted cautiously to avoid coming across as overtly political while millions of people are imperiled.

U.S. stock markets were set to be closed on Tuesday. They closed on Monday for the first time since the attacks of September 11, 2001.

The federal government in Washington was closed and schools were shut up and down the East Coast.

NYSE Euronext said there had been no damage to the New York Stock Exchange headquarters that could impair trading floor operations but it was making contingency plans in case of such damage.

Sandy killed 66 people in the Caribbean last week before pounding U.S. coastal areas.

(Additional reporting Edith Honan, Greg Roumeliotis, Janet McGurty, Scott DiSavino and Martinne Geller in New York Tabassum Zakaria in Washington; writing by Ellen Wulfhorst; editing by Dan Burns and Bill Trott)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/massive-storm-sandy-crashes-ashore-jersey-001837944--finance.html

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