About the damages caused by Irene
飓风还是来了，首先是NY Times的报道：[b][color=red]Storm Damage Largely Spares New York[/color][/b]
Tropical Storm [url=http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/h/hurricanes_and_tropical_storms/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier][color=#004276]Irene[/color][/url] swept through the desolate streets of New York on Sunday, flooding low-lying areas and leaving millions of homes without power along the Eastern Seaboard as it continued on to New England. Most New Yorkers emerged from their makeshift bunkers to find little of the widespread devastation the authorities had feared.
The storm, which was downgraded from a hurricane shortly before it hit New York, attacked in a flurry of punches. A police station in Cranford, N.J., flooded and had to be evacuated. Firefighters paddling in boats rescued more than 60 people from five-foot floodwaters on Staten Island. New York’s major airports were closed, and at least four storm-related deaths were reported in New York State and New Jersey.
But after wide-ranging precautionary measures by city officials that included shutting down New York’s mass-transit network, sandbagging storefronts on Fifth Avenue and issuing evacuation orders for 370,000 people across the city, Hurricane Irene is likely to be remembered by New Yorkers more for what did not happen than for what did.
Windows in skyscrapers did not shatter. Subway tunnels did not flood. Power was not shut off pre-emptively. The water grid did not burst. There were no reported fatalities in the five boroughs. And the rivers flanking Manhattan did not overrun their banks.
Still, when the center of the storm arrived over New York City, about 9 a.m., winds had reached 65 miles per hour, making Irene the largest storm to hit the city in more than 25 years, even as the bulk of the storm’s power was reserved for the suburbs.
“All in all, we are in pretty good shape because of the exhaustive steps I think we took to prepare for whatever came our way,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at a news conference on Sunday afternoon.
Before striking New York, the storm left a path of wreckage that killed at least 16 people in six states, paralyzed most modes of transportation across the Northeast and caused flooding in several states.
“Many Americans are still at risk of power outages and flooding,” President Obama said, “which could get worse in the coming days as rivers swell past their banks.”
New York’s economic costs have yet to be calculated, but with Broadway dark, storefronts covered in plywood and virtually the entire population shuttered indoors, the weekend’s lost sales and storm damage could end up costing the city about $6 billion, said Peter Morici, a business school professor at the University of Maryland. The total national cost could reach $40 billion, Mr. Morici added.
Outside New York City, the storm’s wrath was stark. In New Jersey, more than 800,000 customers were without power on Sunday, and the state’s largest utility, Public Service Electric and Gas, estimated it could take a week to restore electricity to all of its customers. In Connecticut, 670,000 customers had lost power — roughly half the state — which surpassed power failures caused by Hurricane Gloria in 1985.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said more than 300 roadways were blocked, but he warned that dire problems were still to come, particularly along the Delaware, Ramapo and Passaic Rivers. “The real issue that we are going to have to deal with now is flooding,” Mr. Christie said.
Flooding in Philadelphia reached levels that had not been seen in that city in more than 140 years. Vermont was also struck particularly hard; even as the worst of the winds had dissipated, flooding forced officials to evacuate parts of southern Vermont, and floods were expected in the northern portion of the state as late as Monday.
In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said it could take a week to fully restore power to the 750,000 customers without electricity. That included 457,000 on Long Island, 50,000 in Westchester County and 34,000 in Queens, officials said. Consolidated Edison said power was not cut in Manhattan.
Mr. Obama said that though the storm had not proved as strong as many feared, the aftermath would be substantial. “The impacts of this storm will be felt for some time,” he said Sunday from the White House. “And the recovery effort will last for weeks or longer. I want people to understand that this is not over.”
But despite the lack of power, flooding and foiled weekend plans, the soggy Northeast’s collective mood shifted Sunday from dread to relief.
In New York, joggers, not floodwaters, were spotted along the East River. Restaurants, bookstores and bars reopened. Traffic picked up, and officials at the United States Open announced that the tournament would begin on Monday after all.
By 11 a.m., with the sun peeking out, tourists flocked to Central Park even though police officers shooed them away for fear of falling branches.
“I slept like a baby,” said Steven Boone, a homeless man who rode out the storm in a shelter in the East Village. “Nowhere near as bad as I thought.”
Despite the region’s relative good fortune, many applauded the preparations for a worst-case disaster. Mr. Bloomberg strongly defended the drastic measures, which saw 9,000 evacuees enter 81 emergency shelters.
“I would make the same decisions again without hesitation,” he said. “We’re just not going to take any risk with people’s lives, and the best scenario possible is you take the precautions and it turns out they’re not needed.”
The city lifted a highly unusual evacuation order of low-lying neighborhoods a day after residents of Zone A — including Coney Island, the Rockaways and Battery Park City — were ordered to leave for their own safety. (The city’s zoned labels showed signs of outlasting the storm’s more tangible effects. Viktoriya Gaponski, a fashion blogger, said on Twitter that she planned to “only date Zone B men from now on. Less dangerous than Zone A, but edgier than Zone C.”)
The region could be grappling with snarled transportation lines for days. In New York, officials said that most of the subway’s 22 lines would be partially restored in time for the Monday morning commute. On the Metro-North Railroad, fallen trees and downed wires caused problems throughout suburban New York and Connecticut. The Long Island Rail Road faced similar challenges.
New Jersey Transit officials hoped to resume bus and commuter rail service on Monday. PATH trains were expected to resume on Monday, as well.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said the city’s three major airports would reopen by Monday morning.
The storm caused several deaths in the region, including at least three in New Jersey. Celena Sylvestri, 20, was driving to her boyfriend’s house when she was caught in flood waters in Salem County. Ms. Sylvestri called police to say she was trapped in water up to her neck, but by the time rescue workers found her, eight hours later, she was already dead inside her car.
In Buena Vista, N.J., in Atlantic County, officials scrambled to evacuate three dozen elderly residents from trailer homes that were threatened by sudden flooding.
The police also said a 39-year-old volunteer rescue worker for Princeton Township’s Rescue and First Aid squad was in critical condition on Sunday after he was injured while trying to make a rescue in swift-moving water at 4:30 a.m.
There were close calls in New York City, as well. In the Bulls Head section of Staten Island, dozens of people stood on their nearly submerged porches to flag down firefighters who took them to safety in their rafts. The flood waters had swallowed rows of parked cars, angering at least one resident.
“I was like, ‘This hurricane isn’t cool anymore,’ ” said Safina Skaf, 27, who woke up to find her new sport utility vehicle underwater. “Please go away now.”
In Brooklyn on Sunday afternoon, bars flung open their windows and sidewalk cafes set up outdoor tables as businesses and patrons looked to make up for a lost Saturday night. The Greenlight Bookstore in Fort Greene said it was packed less than 10 minutes after opening around 2:30 p.m. Across the street, Habana Outpost served margaritas and planned to play a movie outdoors as long as the weather cooperated.
Others found poetry in the gales of wind and sheets of rain.
“You may not see this again in your lifetime,” said Teddy Ferris, 55, an East Village resident who had refused to evacuate and had taken a seat along the East River on Sunday morning. “This is beautiful. This is nature at its best.” [i=s] 本帖最后由 雨落风残 于 2011-8-29 10:35 编辑 [/i]
Cleanup begins after Irene’s weekend of destruction
Hundreds of thousands of people in the Mid-Atlantic remained without power Sunday, as crews hurried to restore electricity and former hurricane Irene plowed into New England, leaving a sodden and battered East Coast in its wake.
Nearly 20 deaths were reported, including a Maryland woman who was killed when a chimney toppled and a Virginia girl killed in a car crash, as officials tallied the destruction left by the storm, which pummeled the coast from Cape Hatteras to Cape Cod.
Even as repairs began in the Washington area on a sunny, breezy Sunday, the height of hurricane season saw another storm spawned in the Atlantic Ocean — headed away from land — and a third system under observation off the west coast of Africa.
Irene, although downgraded to a tropical storm and far less potent than originally imagined, cut electricity to 1.2 million Dominion power customers in Virginia and North Carolina, resulting in the biggest repair effort since Hurricane Isabel in 2003, the utility said.
More than 6,000 line workers and support personnel, some from Alabama, Indiana, and Michigan, were working to restore power ahead of Labor Day weekend.
In Southern Maryland, which was hit hard, one unit of the Calvert Cliffs nuclear power plant automatically shut down when a piece of siding from a nearby building was blown into a facility transformer. Crews were trying to get it restarted.
In a statement Sunday evening, President Obama said that much remained to be done, but he praised officials from the top down.
“This has been an exemplary effort of how good government, at every level, should be responsive to peoples’ needs,” Obama said.
Federal offices are scheduled to be open Monday, with unscheduled leave and telework available.
Metro said it anticipates operating normally Monday. All three MARC train lines were expected to have full service, according to the Maryland Transit Administration, although power was out at several stations, so passengers were encouraged to take flashlights. Virginia Railway Express was also expecting to operate with a full schedule, although power outages could result in delays on the Fredericksburg Line.
Despite warnings about the hurricane’s effects on New York City, Wall Street was set to go back to work as usual Monday morning.
The storm dumped more than a foot of rain in places up and down the coast, clobbering the Jersey Shore and prompting the evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people in New Jersey and New York City. Philadelphia saw extensive flooding, as local creeks overflowed and the Schuylkill River, which runs through the city, became a muddy torrent.
In Vermont, a woman was swept away Sunday by the swollen Deerfield River, west of Brattleboro, while watching the water with her boyfriend, the Associated Press reported. The area experienced extensive flooding.
As the storm moved inland, rivers rose and towns across Upstate New York were flooded.
Closer to the Washington area, 11 inches of rain fell in Camp Springs, according to AccuWeather, a private forecasting agency. Twelve inches fell in Ocean City, and 14 inches — the highest confirmed total — in Bunyan, N.C., about 50 miles inland from Cape Hatteras.
More than 800,000 electricity customers lost service in Maryland, including, by late afternoon, 55,000 Pepco customers in Montgomery County and 8,700 in Prince George’s County, officials said. In the District, 32,000 Pepco customers lost power.
As of about 4 p.m., BG&E reported about 12,000 customers without power in Prince George’s, and 7,000 in Montgomery.
In eastern Silver Spring, where residents said outages can be chronic, Miki Bell, a 42-year-old communications consultant, said: “No news here. It’s just sad when you can legitimately plan for the power going out. It’s second nature.”
Trees fell on houses and cars, and the wind and rain left a carpet of storm litter from trees across the Washington region.
A tree outside an emergency operations center in Hyattsville fell on two cars belonging to people inside.
“It was kind of ironic,” said fire and rescue spokesman Mark Brady. “You are in there doing your job, and this happens.”
Quentin Banks, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Emergency Management Agency, said that a woman in Queen Anne County died after a tree fell on the chimney of her house and it collapsed, crushing her.
A 15-year-old Manassas Park high school student was killed in Goldsboro, N.C., in a traffic accident at the height of the storm, police there said. A traffic light that was out because of a power failure led her family’s sport-utility vehicle to crash into another vehicle as they headed back to the Washington area from a vacation in South Carolina.
Storm-related flight cancellations continued, although the three Washington area airports remained open.
Public schools in Prince George’s, Calvert and St. Mary’s counties will be closed Monday, along with St. Mary’s College of Maryland. Schools in Howard and Charles counties, which were to open for the year Monday, will also be closed. Public schools in Anne Arundel County will be closed.
In the District, most schools are expected to open on time, officials said.
Because of high water in Upper Marlboro, the Prince George’s seat, officials were assessing Sunday night whether the county administration building and the county courthouse nearby would open Monday. County Executive Rushern L. Baker III (D) said the government will operate either way.
Despite the destruction and disruption, there was a sense that the hurricane was not as bad as it could have been. The police chief in Ocean City likened it to dodging a bullet.
Actually, said Ocean City Mayor Richard Meehan, the city had dodged “a missile.”
“We’re back open for business,” he said, “and we want to welcome everyone back to Ocean City.”
In Delaware, Gov. Jack Markell (D) lifted the statewide mandatory evacuation order for Rehoboth Beach on Sunday morning, and businesses were allowed to reopen. Some roads were blocked by standing water and downed trees.
Forecasters said the hurricane was weakened by its impact with the North Carolina coast, dry air that infiltrated the system and wind shear — changes in wind speed and direction.
“A lot of forecasters were concerned about a worst-case scenario, where the storm did not lose its intensity as it impacted the Outer Banks up through the Mid-Atlantic,” said Washington Post meteorologist Jason Samenow.
“What happened is, the storm did weaken,” he said. “It encountered dry air as it got closer to the coast. Instead of dealing with a Category 2 or Category 3 landfall, you had a Category 1 type of landfall. . . . So the worst-case scenario didn’t really play out.”
In the District, damage was limited to power outages and 40 to 50 downed trees and limbs throughout the city, said Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D), who visited nearly a dozen sites where damage was considered most severe.
Gray, who was without power at his Hillcrest home, began touring the city about 9:45 a.m., although he’d been out overnight.
During an afternoon news conference, the mayor reflected on the eventful week: Monday’s opening of schools, Tuesday’s earthquake, the decision to postpone Sunday’s dedication of the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial, and Saturday’s hurricane.
“There’s a movie in here somewhere,” he joked.
On Saturday, the city opened five shelters for displaced residents, but Gray said just two families — a total of eight people — took advantage and stayed at Kennedy Recreation Center.
William O. Howland Jr., director of the Department of Public Works, said residents with limbs and debris in their yards should cut them into four-foot long pieces and place them at curbs for pickup this week.
In Alexandria, on North Overlook Drive in Beverly Hills, residents who had power stretched extension cords across the street to residents who did not have power.
“We’ve been doing it for as long as I can remember,” said Dave Lloyd, 68, who has lived in the neighborhood since 1986. He lost power about 1:30 a.m. and said he walked the extension cord over to his neighbor’s house sometime after 7 a.m. “When that side goes out, we do the same for them.”
The borrowed electricity, he said, was enough to keep the fridge going and a few lights on. Then, Lloyd said, it was just a matter of waiting on Dominion. Residents suspect the outage was caused by a fallen tree that brought down the power line.
“The last hurricane, Isabel, I think it was six days we were without power,” Lloyd said. “This time, I suspect it could be a couple days. There’s not much you can do, except wait.” [color=Red][b]Irene floods northeast, Manhattan spared worst[/b][/color]NEW YORK (Reuters) - Hurricane Irene swept through Manhattan on Sunday but reserved the worst of its fury for towns and suburbs up and down the northeastern United States 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 killed at least 20 people, left some 5 million homes and businesses without electricity, caused widespread flooding and downed thousands of trees. Suburban New Jersey and rural Vermont were hit particularly hard.
Irene forced the closure of New York's mass transit system, which will crawl back to service on Monday starting at 6 a.m., and the cancellation of thousands of flights, some of which would resume on Monday. Most of the commuter rail service bringing commuters from the suburbs to New York City would remain suspended.
President Barack Obama warned 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. Irene was still a tropical storm, packing winds of 50 mph as it approached Canada, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.
It wasn't immediately clear how much Irene would cost but in New Jersey alone the damage was 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 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 took unprecedented steps to prepare, including mandatory evacuations and a total shutdown of mass transit systems that will have had a major economic impact.
About 370,000 city residents who had been ordered to leave their homes were told they could return on Sunday afternoon.
Most bridges, tunnels, subways and city buses will be functioning normally, but the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road commuter rail would remain suspended, stranding commuters who travel to Manhattan from suburbs to the north and east.
Rail service from New Jersey, home to hundreds of thousands of people who travel into New York each day, was still out, although limited bus services were expected to resume.
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 were expected to open as normal, albeit with reduced volume.
"All in all we are in pretty good shape," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said, adding that while it would be a "tough commute" on Monday there had been no long-term damage to the subway system.
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 rescued more than 60 people including three babies from 21 homes flooded with five feet of water.
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.
New Jersey 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.
Four people were killed in Pennsylvania from the effects of Hurricane Irene, including two men killed by falling trees, a state official said. That raised the U.S. total to 20 dead in addition to three who were killed in the Dominican Republic and one in Puerto Rico when the storm was still in the Caribbean.
Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, whose state 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 massive flooding in the Financial District surrounding Wall Street was feared, there was a foot of water in the streets at the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan before the tide began receding at 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."
Nearby, a man was walking two dogs through water that came up to the bellies of his pets. 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 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 over the boardwalk and onto the streets, taking with them a two-story life-guard station.
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 Martin Howell, Daniel Trota and Anthony Boadle)
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