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Debris litter a flooded street in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn after the city awakens to the affects of Hurricane Sandy on October 30, 2012 in New York, United States. At least 15 people were reported killed in the United States by Sandy as millions of people in the eastern United States have awoken to widespread power outages, flooded homes and downed trees. New York City was hit especially hard with wide spread power outages and significant flooding in parts of the city. -- PHOTO: AFP

NEW YORK (AP) - As Superstorm Sandy marched slowly inland, millions along the US East Coast awoke on Tuesday without power or mass transit, with huge swaths of the nation's largest city unusually vacant and dark.

New York was among the hardest hit, with its financial heart shuttered for a second day and seawater cascading into the still-gaping construction pit at the World Trade Center.

The storm that made landfall in New Jersey on Monday evening with 130kmh sustained winds killed at least 16 people in seven states, cut power to more than 6 million homes and businesses from the Carolinas to Ohio and put the presidential campaign on hold one week before Election Day.

"This will be one for the record books," said Mr John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Consolidated Edison, which had more than 670,000 customers without power in and around New York City.

Trading at the New York Stock Exchange was cancelled again on Tuesday - the first time the exchange suspended operations for two consecutive days due to weather since an 1888 blizzard struck the city.

President Barack Obama declared a major disaster in New York and Long Island, making federal funding available to residents of the area.

New York City's three major airports remained closed. Overall, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware, more than 13,500 flights had been cancelled for Monday and Tuesday, almost all related to the storm.

An unprecedented 3.9m surge of seawater - 0.9m above the previous record - gushed into lower Manhattan, inundating tunnels, subway stations and the electrical system that powers Wall Street and sent hospital patients and tourists scrambling for safety. Skyscrapers swayed and creaked in winds that partially toppled a crane 74 stories above Midtown.

In New Jersey, where the superstorm came ashore, hundreds of people were being evacuated after a levee broke early on Tuesday. Bergen County executive chief of staff Jeanne Baratta told The Record newspaper as many as 1,000 people could need help. There are no reports of injuries or deaths.

The massive storm reached well into the Midwest. Chicago officials warned residents to stay away from the Lake Michigan shore as the city prepared for winds of up to 96kmh and waves exceeding 7.2m well into Wednesday.

As Hurricane Sandy closed in on the Northeast, it converged with a cold-weather system that turned it into a monstrous hybrid of rain and high wind - and even snow in West Virginia and other mountainous areas inland.

Remnants of the now-former Category 1 hurricane were forecast to head across Pennsylvania before taking another sharp turn into western New York state by Wednesday morning. As of 5am local time (9am GMT, 5pm Singapore time) on Tuesday, the storm was centred about 145km west of Philadelphia.

Although weakening as it goes, the massive storm - which caused wind warnings from Florida to Canada - will continue to bring heavy rain and local flooding, said Mr Daniel Brown, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Officials blamed at least 16 deaths in the US on the converging storms - five in New York, three each in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, two in Connecticut, and one each in Maryland, North Carolina and West Virginia. Three of the victims were children, one just 8 years old. At least one death was blamed on the storm in Canada.

Sandy, which killed 69 people in the Caribbean before making its way up the Atlantic Coast, began to hook left at midday Monday toward the New Jersey coast. Even before it made landfall, crashing waves had claimed an old, 15m piece of Atlantic City's world-famous Boardwalk.

"We are looking at the highest storm surges ever recorded" in the Northeast, said Mr Jeff Masters, meteorology director for Weather Underground, a private forecasting service.

Sitting on the dangerous northeast wall of the storm, the New York metropolitan area got the worst of it.

An explosion at a ConEdison substation knocked out power to about 310,000 customers in Manhattan.

"We see a pop. The whole sky lights up," said Ms Dani Hart, 30, who was watching the storm from the roof of her building in the Navy Yards in Brooklyn.

"It sounded like the Fourth of July," Mr Stephen Weisbrot said from his 10th-floor apartment in lower Manhattan.

A huge fire destroyed at least 50 homes in a flooded neighborhood by the Atlantic Ocean in the New York City borough of Queens. Firefighters told WABC-TV that the water was chest high on the street, and they had to use a boat to make rescues. Two people suffered minor injuries, a fire department spokesman said.

New York University's (NYU) Tisch Hospital was forced to evacuate 200 patients after its backup generator failed. NYU Medical Dean Robert Grossman said patients - among them 20 babies from the neonatal intensive care unit who were on battery-powered respirators - had to be carried down staircases and to dozens of ambulances waiting to take them to other hospitals.

Not only was the subway shut down, but the Holland Tunnel connecting New York to New Jersey was closed, as was a tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Brooklyn Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and several other spans were closed due to high winds.

A construction crane atop a US$1.5 billion (S$1.8 billion) luxury high-rise in midtown Manhattan collapsed in high winds and dangled precariously. Thousands of people were ordered to leave several nearby buildings as a precaution, including 900 guests at the ultramodern Le Parker Meridien hotel.

Ms Alice Goldberg, 15, a tourist from Paris, was watching television in the hotel - whose slogan is "Uptown, Not Uptight" - when a voice came over the loudspeaker and told everyone to leave.

"They said to take only what we needed, and leave the rest, because we'll come back in two or three days," she said as she and hundreds of others gathered in the luggage-strewn marble lobby. "I hope so."

Off North Carolina, not far from an area known as "the Graveyard of the Atlantic," a replica of the 18th-century sailing ship HMS Bounty that was built for the 1962 Marlon Brando movie "Mutiny on the Bounty" sank when her diesel engine and bilge pumps failed. Coast Guard helicopters plucked 14 crew members from rubber lifeboats bobbing in 18-foot (5.4-meter) seas.

A 15th crew member who was found unresponsive several hours after the others was later pronounced dead. The Bounty's captain was still missing.

President Barack Obama scrapped his campaign events for Monday and Tuesday to stay at the White House to oversee the government's response to the superstorm.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was going ahead with a planned event in Ohio on Tuesday, but his campaign said its focus would be on storm relief.

About 360,000 people in 30 Connecticut towns were urged to leave their homes under mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders. Christi McEldowney was among those who fled to a Fairfield shelter. She and other families brought tents for their children to play in.

"There's something about this storm," she said. "I feel it deep inside."

Sandy leaves 145,000 Canadians without power, 1 dead



 

Published on Oct 30, 2012





Flowers are left on the site where a woman was killed after she was hit by a flying sign that came apart due to high winds from the remnants of Hurricane Sandy in Toronto, October 30, 2012. Sandy toppled trees and power lines in the Canadian province of Ontario, leaving at least 145,000 people without power on Tuesday, including 55,000 in Toronto, the country's financial center. -- PHOTO: REUTERS



WINNIPEG (REUTERS) - Sandy toppled trees and power lines in the Canadian province of Ontario, leaving at least 145,000 people without power on Tuesday, including 55,000 in Toronto, the country's financial centre.

Strong winds whipped up debris, killing a Toronto woman on Monday.

The Toronto Stock Exchange was set to remain open, making it a North American island of equity trading for the second successive day, with US stock markets closed.

Numerous flights on Air Canada, WestJet Airlines, Porter Airlines and other carriers between the US Northeast and Toronto's Pearson International Airport and Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport were cancelled.

"It's been a long night," said Mr Mike Bradley, mayor of the Lake Huron border city of Sarnia, Ontario, where winds are expected to gust to 100 km/h.

"Waves were running from six to nine metres, which people around here cannot remember for at least a generation," he told CBC. "I'm sitting in the dark, we've just lost the power."

Ontario officials had warned people to stay inside as gusts from the huge storm swept through the province, citing risks of flooding and other damage. But the impact was tiny compared to the vast outages and widespread flooding seen in the US East Coast.

US companies hustle to re-staff, reopen after Sandy



 

Published on Oct 30, 2012



NEW YORK/CHICAGO (REUTERS) - Hurricane Sandy may have devastated the East Coast on Monday, but the water-logged wheels of commerce keep turning, storm damage or not.

As cities from New York down to Washington began to dig out from the historic destruction brought by Sandy, companies scrambled on Tuesday to assess their facilities with an eye toward reopening as soon as possible.

At least 15 people were reported killed along the Eastern seaboard by Sandy, one of the biggest storms to ever hit the country, which dropped just below hurricane status before making landfall on Monday night in New Jersey.

With the holiday season quickly approaching and tourists unlikely to be dissuaded from shopping, retailers in particular were hurrying on Tuesday to get back to business.

Luxury department store Saks said it would reopen on Tuesday three of the stores that it had to close because of Sandy, including stores in greater Washington and Philadelphia.

The retailer's flagship on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, which generates about 20 per cent of company sales, along with five other stores in New Jersey and Connecticut, are set to reopen on Wednesday, a spokeswoman said.

Saks said it would not be coordinating transportation for employees.

"In the NYC store, many associates live nearby, and we can operate the store with lower staffing levels if needed," a representative said.

Similarly, Macy's said its iconic Herald Square flagship store in Manhattan, and others in the city and in parts of New Jersey, would stay closed on Tuesday. Others in the East will open through the course of the day.

"The determining factor is if the store and shopping center have electricity, and if associates are able to get to work," a Macy's spokesman said, adding that the company had 195 stores closed all or part of the day on Monday, about a quarter of its footprint.

Wal-Mart Stores had 267 stores closed as of late Monday night due to the storm. By Tuesday morning, that was down to 168, with plans in progress to reopen some stores on generator power.

The world's largest retailer said none of its facilities had been seriously damaged and there was no disruption of holiday planning.

Drugmakers, heavily concentrated in New York and New Jersey, were also laid low by the storm. Novartis AG said all offices in the area would remain closed on Tuesday, as did top insulin maker Novo Nordisk.

GlaxoSmithKline Plc said it had implemented a continuity plan to ensure medicines would continue to be distributed, especially given the numerous airport closures still in effect. But the company also said there was sufficient inventory in the supply chain to avoid serious disruptions.

Relatively high amounts of pharmaceuticals move by air, since drugs are light and high-value items, meaning companies like GSK have to arrange road transport in the meantime.

Multiply a decision like that by a few dozen or even hundreds of companies, and Sandy could actually end up being a boon to the trucking industry despite the short-term costs of widespread road closures.

"In the long run, however, the effect is clearly positive, perhaps close to US$1 billion (S$1.2 billion), because resupply and rebuilding generates freight growth and because trucking is the mode of choice for time-sensitive resupply," said Noel Perry, managing director at transportation consulting firm FTR Associates.

 

US East Coast power outages from Hurricane Sandy reach 8m



 

Published on Oct 30, 2012





(REUTERS) - US East Coast electric companies say outages from Hurricane Sandy so far have hit more than 8.1 million homes and businesses, the US Department of Energy (DOE) said in a report early on Tuesday.

Sandy made landfall near Atlantic City, New Jersey at about 8pm EDT (8am Singapore time) on Monday, the DOE said.

New Jersey was the hardest hit state with about 2.5 million customers out, about 62 per cent of the state total.

Other hard hit states include Connecticut with 31 per cent or 626,400 customers out; Rhode Island with 23 per cent or 116,300 out; West Virginia with 21 per cent or 212,100 customers out; New York with 21 per cent or about 2 million out; Pennsylvania with 20 per cent or 1.3 million out; and New Hampshire with 20 percent or 142,000 out.

The utilities with the most customers out of service were units of FirstEnergy Corp, Public Service Enterprise Group Inc, Consolidated Edison, Northeast Utilities, PPL Corp, National Grid PLC, Pepco Holdings Group Inc and Iberdrola SA.

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