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| A parking lot full of yellow cabs is flooded as a result of superstorm Sandy on Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012 in Hoboken, NJ. |
NEW YORK (AP) -- Millions of people from Maine to the Carolinas awoke Tuesday without electricity, and an eerily quiet New York City was all but closed off by car, train and air as superstorm Sandy steamed inland, still delivering punishing wind and rain. The U.S. death toll climbed to 39, many of the victims killed by falling trees.
The
full extent of the damage in New Jersey, where the storm roared ashore
Monday night with hurricane-force winds of 80 mph, was unclear. Police
and fire officials, some with their own departments flooded, fanned out
to rescue hundreds.
"We are in the midst of
urban search and rescue. Our teams are moving as fast as they can," Gov.
Chris Christie said. "The devastation on the Jersey Shore is some of
the worst we've ever seen. The cost of the storm is incalculable at this
point."
More than 8.2 million people across
the East were without power. Airlines canceled more than 15,000 flights
around the world, and it could be days before the mess is untangled and
passengers can get where they're going.
The storm also disrupted the presidential campaign with just a week to go before Election Day.
President
Barack Obama canceled a third straight day of campaigning, scratching
events scheduled for Wednesday in swing state Ohio. Republican Mitt
Romney resumed his campaign, but with plans to turn a political rally in
Ohio into a "storm relief event."
Sandy will
end up causing about $20 billion in property damage and $10 billion to
$30 billion more in lost business, making it one of the costliest
natural disasters on record in the U.S., according to IHS Global
Insight, a forecasting firm.
Lower Manhattan,
which includes Wall Street, was among the hardest-hit areas after the
storm sent a nearly 14-foot surge of seawater, a record, coursing over
its seawalls and highways.
Water cascaded into
the gaping, unfinished construction pit at the World Trade Center, and
the New York Stock Exchange was closed for a second day, the first time
that has happened because of weather since the Blizzard of 1888. The
NYSE said it will reopen on Wednesday.
A huge
fire destroyed as many as 100 houses in a flooded beachfront
neighborhood in Queens on Tuesday, forcing firefighters to undertake
daring rescues. Three people were injured.
New
York University's Tisch Hospital evacuated 200 patients after its
backup generator failed. About 20 babies from the neonatal intensive
care unit were carried down staircases and were given battery-powered
respirators.
A construction crane that
collapsed in the high winds on Monday still dangled precariously 74
floors above the streets of midtown Manhattan, and hundreds of people
were evacuated as a precaution. And on Staten Island, a tanker ship
wound up beached on the shore.
Most major
tunnels and bridges in New York were closed, as were schools, Broadway
theaters and the metropolitan area's three main airports, LaGuardia,
Kennedy and Newark.
With water standing in two
major commuter tunnels and seven subway tunnels under the East River,
Mayor Michael Bloomberg said it was unclear when the nation's largest
transit system would be rolling again. It shut down Sunday night ahead
of the storm.
Joseph Lhota, chairman of the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said the damage was the worst in
the 108-year history of the New York subway.
Similarly,
Consolidated Edison said it could take at least a week to restore
electricity to the last of the nearly 800,000 customers in and around
New York City who lost power.
Millions of more fortunate New Yorkers surveyed the damage as dawn broke, their city brought to an extraordinary standstill.
"Oh, Jesus. Oh, no," Faye Schwartz said she looked over her neighborhood in Brooklyn, where cars were scattered like leaves.
Reggie
Thomas, a maintenance supervisor at a prison near the overflowing
Hudson River, emerged from an overnight shift, a toothbrush in his front
pocket, to find his Honda with its windows down and a foot of water
inside. The windows automatically go down when the car is submerged to
free drivers.
"It's totaled," Thomas said with a shrug. "You would have needed a boat last night."
Around
midday, Sandy was about 120 miles east of Pittsburgh, pushing westward
with winds of 45 mph, and was expected to make a turn into New York
State on Tuesday night. Although weakening as it goes, the storm will
continue to bring heavy rain and flooding, said Daniel Brown of the
National Hurricane Center in Miami.
In a
measure of the storm's immense size and power, waves on southern Lake
Michigan rose to a record-tying 20.3 feet. High winds spinning off
Sandy's edges clobbered the Cleveland area early Tuesday, uprooting
trees, cutting power to hundreds of thousands, closing schools and
flooding major roads along Lake Erie.
In Portland, Maine, gusts topping 60 mph scared away several cruise ships and prompted officials to close the port.
Sandy
also brought blizzard conditions to parts of West Virginia and
neighboring Appalachian states, with more than 2 feet of snow expected
in some places. A snowstorm in western Maryland caused a pileup of
tractor-trailers that blocked part of Interstate 68 on slippery Big
Savage Mountain.
"It's like a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs up here," said Bill Wiltson, a Maryland State Police dispatcher.
The
death toll climbed rapidly, and included 17 victims in New York State -
10 of them in New York City - along with five dead in Pennsylvania and
five in New Jersey. Sandy also killed 69 people in the Caribbean before
making its way up the Eastern Seaboard.
In New
Jersey, Sandy cut off barrier islands, swept houses from their
foundations and washed amusement pier rides into the ocean. It also
wrecked several boardwalks up and down the coast, tearing away a section
of Atlantic City's world-famous promenade. Atlantic City's 12
waterfront casinos came through largely unscathed.
Jersey
City was closed to cars because traffic lights were out, and Hoboken,
just over the Hudson River from Manhattan, was hit with major flooding.
A
huge swell of water swept over the small New Jersey town of Moonachie,
near the Hackensack River, and authorities struggled to rescue about 800
people, some living in a trailer park. And in neighboring Little Ferry,
water suddenly started gushing out of storm drains overnight,
submerging a road under 4 feet of water and swamping houses.
Police and fire officials used boats and trucks to reach the stranded.
"I
looked out and the next thing you know, the water just came up through
the grates. It came up so quickly you couldn't do anything about it. If
you wanted to move your car to higher ground you didn't have enough
time," said Little Ferry resident Leo Quigley, who with his wife was
taken to higher ground by boat.
