New York - Sandy, one of the biggest storms ever to hit the United States, roared ashore with fierce winds and heavy rain on Monday near the gambling resort of Atlantic City, New Jersey, after forcing evacuations, shutting down transportation and interrupting the presidential campaign.
High winds and flooding racked hundreds of kilometres of Atlantic coastline while heavy snows were forecast farther inland at higher elevations as the centre of the storm marched westward.
More than three million customers already were left without power by early evening and more than a million people were subject to evacuation orders. Many communities were swamped by flood waters.
The National Hurricane Centre said Sandy came ashore as a “post-tropical cyclone”, meaning it still packed hurricane-force winds but lost the characteristics of a tropical storm. It had sustained winds of 129km/h, well above the threshold for hurricane intensity.
The storm's target area includes big population centres such as New York City, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Trees were downed across the region, untethered pieces of scaffolding rolled down the ghostly streets of New York City, falling debris closed a major bridge in Boston and floodwater inundated side streets in the resort town of Dewey Beach, Delaware, leaving just the tops of mailboxes in view.
In Fairfield, a Connecticut coastal town and major commuter point into Manhattan, police cruisers blocked the main road leading to the beaches and yellow police tape cordoned off side entrances. Beach pavilions were boarded up with plywood, and gusts of wind rocked parked cars.
“People are definitely not taking this seriously enough,” police officer Tiffany Barrett, 38, said. “Our worst fear is something like Katrina and we can't get to people.”
US stock markets were closed for the first time since the attacks of September 11, 2001, and will remain shut on Tuesday. The federal government in Washington was closed and schools were shut up and down the East Coast.
One disaster forecasting company predicted economic losses could ultimately reach $20-billion, only half insured.
Governors up and down the East Coast declared states of emergency. Maryland's Martin O'Malley warned there was no question Sandy would kill people in its way.
Sandy made landfall just south of Atlantic City, about 190km south-west of Manhattan. Casinos in Atlantic City had already shut down.
Television images showed water rising to historic heights in lower Manhattan, raising the possibility of flooding in the city's subway system.
New York electric utility Con Edison said it expected “record-size outages”, with nearly 35 000 customers in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn likely to be impacted. The company is facing both falling trees knocking down power lines from above and flood waters swamping underground systems from below.
“In the olden days, you would have had lots of fatalities. We're not through this yet... It may be as bad of (a) storm as we've ever seen, but I would expect the damage to be relatively minor,” New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a Monday evening news conference.
New York City evacuated neighbours of a 90-storey super luxury apartment building under construction after its crane partially collapsed in high winds, prompting fears the entire rig could crash to the ground.
Meteorologists say Sandy is a rare, hybrid “superstorm” created by an Arctic jet stream wrapping itself around a tropical storm.
The combination of those two storms would have been bad enough, but meteorologists said there was a third storm at play - a system coming down from Canada that would effectively trap the hurricane-nor'easter combo and hold it in place.
While Sandy does not have the intensity of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, it has been gathering strength. It killed 66 people in the Caribbean last week before pounding US coastal areas as it moved north.
An AccuWeather meteorologist said Sandy “is unfolding as the Northeast's Katrina”, and others said Sandy could be the largest storm to hit the mainland in US history. - Reuters