Eastern U.S. struggles back to life after Sandy’s onslaught

CLOUDS HANG OVER the darkened lower Manhattan skyline at night in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012. / BLOOMBERG FILE PHOTO/VICTOR J. BLUE
CLOUDS HANG OVER the darkened lower Manhattan skyline at night in New York, U.S., on Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012. / BLOOMBERG FILE PHOTO/VICTOR J. BLUE

NEW YORK – Millions of people in the Northeast U.S., the region most dependent on electric grids and mass transit networks for everyday life, struggled to find normalcy amid the floods, destruction and death from superstorm Sandy.
The biggest Atlantic storm in history, spanning an area broader than Texas, caused at least 50 U.S. deaths, according to the Associated Press, including 18 in New York City that Mayor Michael Bloomberg reported. Many government offices and U.S. stock markets, which shut for two days, plan to open today, with the exception of New Jersey government. Millions remained without power.
“Sandy hit us very hard, it was a storm of historic intensity, but New Yorkers are resilient and we’ve seen an outpouring of support,” the mayor said at a news briefing yesterday. “We have a plan for recovery, and that recovery is already beginning. It’s the beginning of a process that we all know will take a while.”
President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit New Jersey today to tour what Governor Chris Christie described as “absolute devastation,” such as seaside towns with houses ripped from their foundations. Bloomberg said he declined an offer from the president to visit the city.
“What I pointed out to him is that we’d love to have him, but we have lots of things to do,” Bloomberg said. The president declared New York and New Jersey disaster regions eligible for federal relief.

Election interruptus

The storm that interrupted the U.S. presidential race eight days before Election Day weakened to a surface trough of low pressure over western Pennsylvania. The remnants of Sandy are forecast to continue to weaken over the state as it now lacks any discernible circulation and no specific location was stated in a 5 a.m. advisory issued by the Hydrometeorological Prediction Center in College Park, Maryland.
Flood watches and warnings remain in effect for portions of the mid-Atlantic and northeast states and winter storm warnings are still in place for the mountains of southwestern Pennsylvania, western Maryland, West Virginia, eastern Tennessee, eastern Kentucky and extreme western North Carolina, the center said. Dangerous surf conditions will continue from Florida through New England for the next couple of days.

Damage reports

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From Washington to Boston, officials of state and local governments, transit systems and businesses joined homeowners in assessing damage and arranging for recovery. Sandy may cause as much as $20 billion in economic damage and losses, according to Eqecat Inc., a risk-management company in Oakland, California.
Phillips 66’s Bayway refinery in Linden and Hess Corp.’s Port Reading plant, both in New Jersey, remained shut. Philadelphia Energy Solutions’ larger facility in Pennsylvania was restoring operations last night after coming through the storm unscathed, Cherice Corley, a spokeswoman, said in an e- mail yesterday. Gasoline futures rose in electronic trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange today.
Sandy came ashore as a hurricane two days ago near Atlantic City, New Jersey, the second-largest U.S. gaming center, causing “extensive” property damage, yet “the human damage has been minimal,” Mayor Lorenzo Langford told CNN in an interview. Boardwalk gone
“So I think our glass is half full here in Atlantic City,” Langford said. “A large portion of the boardwalk has been washed away. But other than the boardwalk and some power lines and things down — and trees being uprooted, and, of course, a major loss of dunes — I think we did pretty good, all things considered.”
In New York City, subway service may not be restored for four to five days, said the mayor, who is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent of Bloomberg News. Seven subway tubes under the East River were inundated.
City buses resumed limited service late yesterday, with free fares offered on a temporary basis, Bloomberg said. About 6,400 people remained in evacuation centers and may stay until they can safely return home or find temporary housing, he said.
The ING New York City Marathon, the world’s biggest, will be held as scheduled Nov. 4, the mayor said.
Whether thousands of runners from outside the region can reach the city is another matter. About 20,000 of the expected 47,000 are international participants, organizers said. John F. Kennedy International and Newark Liberty International airports, closed for two days by flooded runways and other damage, will reopen today with limited service, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said. LaGuardia and Teterboro airports remain closed.

Search Teams

In New Jersey, six deaths were linked to the storm, Christie said, and search-and-rescue teams were trying to help stranded residents. He said 4,500 people were in shelters.
Christie, one of Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s top backers, praised Obama for his administration’s response to the storm in advance of the president’s visit today. Bloomberg said he asked Obama not to come to the city.
“I’m not trying to diss him, but I know he had planned a trip to New Jersey, and I said that’s fine,” Bloomberg told reporters late yesterday. “I was flattered that he offered to come, but I think the thing for him to do was to go to New Jersey and represent the country.”
In an interview at an emergency operations center in Brooklyn, Bloomberg said he hadn’t talked with Romney during or after the storm. “I have not spoken with him,” he said. Romney’s campaign, which held a storm-relief event in Kettering, Ohio yesterday, didn’t immediately respond to an e-mailed request for comment on which state or local officials the candidate had contacted.

$1 million donation

Wells Fargo & Co., the biggest U.S. home lender, said it will donate $1 million to storm-relief efforts. One-fourth will go to the American Red Cross’s Disaster Relief Find, and the rest will support nonprofit grassroots relief efforts, the San Francisco-based company said yesterday.
U.S. equity markets, closed Oct. 29 and yesterday for the first consecutive shutdown due to weather since 1888, will reopen today, according to NYSE Euronext, Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. and Bats Global Markets Inc. Bond markets, shut yesterday, also were expected to resume trading today, as will energy futures floor trading on the Nymex in lower Manhattan.
The storm that brought a surge of seawater more than 13 feet high in New York City dumped more than a foot (0.3 meter) of rain in parts of Delaware, Maryland and New Jersey. More than two feet of snow was reported in the mountains of Maryland, North Carolina, Virginia and West Virginia.

Emergency declaration

The emergency declaration signed by Obama for the parts of New York and New Jersey hardest hit by the storm will free up federal money to reimburse the states for their costs, Federal Emergency Management Agency Administrator Craig Fugate said. Other state declarations Obama signed before the storm have a $5 million limit on direct federal aid, he said.
The storm left more than 8.2 million electricity customers without power in 20 states from South Carolina to Maine and as far west as Michigan and Indiana, according to the U.S. Energy Department. In New Jersey, 65 percent were without power, and in Connecticut, it was 31 percent, the department said.
Power was lost in Manhattan “river to river,” south of 35th Street, Bloomberg said Oct. 29. Some of the blackout was deliberate, as Consolidated Edison Co. shut off electricity to protect its underground equipment from potential damage, said Chris Olert, a spokesman for the company. Infants evacuated

New York University’s Langone Medical Center, near the East River, evacuated 215 patients, including infants from its neo- natal intensive care unit, and transported them to other hospitals when it lost power and backup systems failed.
In the beachfront neighborhood of Breezy Point, in the New York City borough of Queens, about 200 firefighters fought a blaze that destroyed at least 111 homes and injured two people, the fire department said.
Airlines grounded more than 7,000 U.S. flights yesterday, bringing to 18,100 the number of scrapped trips attributable to Sandy since Oct. 28, according to FlightAware, a Houston-based tracking company.
Sandy forced three nuclear power plants to shut down and put another on alert as federal regulators dispatched inspectors to monitor 11 facilities in the path of the storm.
In Connecticut, New London Mayor Daryl Finizio told WFSB-TV that Sandy threatened to be worse than the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. That storm, which produced tides of as much as 25 feet, killed 564, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In Maryland, Governor Martin O’Malley said the state was fortunate to escape the worst of the storm.
“We were not hit as hard as all of us had anticipated,” he told reporters yesterday. “We were fortunate to have been on the weaker end of this storm.”

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