NATIONAL POST
Winds continue to whip across Quebec as Sandy’s death toll hits 50
Associated Press and Canadian Press | Oct 30, 2012 9:21 PM ET | Last Updated: Oct 31, 2012 3:58 AM ET
REUTERS/Mark BlinchRichard Ward assesses the damage to a car parked Tuesday in front of his house after an electrical fire Monday night. Winds from the remnants of Hurricane Sandy whipped through Toronto Monday night and Tuesday, causing widespread power outages and one death.
TORONTO — Superstorm Sandy continued to lash parts of Quebec with wind Wednesday, with storm surge warnings in place in several regions across the province.
On Tuesday night, northeastern Ontario was bracing for the remnants of the hurricane, which was set to hit the area with snow, mixed with ice pellets, and patchy freezing rain driven by gusts of up to 60 kilometres per hour.
REUTERS/Mark BlinchA power worker in front of the car that was burned in the electrical fire.
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The storm, which is weakening as it travels north, will impact on Canada’s weather for days to come.
Fifty deaths have been blamed on Sandy and millions remain without power along the U.S. East Coast, where the storm made landfall Monday evening.
At the storm’s height in Canada, Sandy left 150,000 customers without power in Ontario, 50,000 in the dark in Quebec and 14,000 in Nova Scotia.
One woman was killed in Toronto after she was hit by a falling store sign.
The strongest gust in Ontario was 106 kilometres an hour on Western Island in Georgian Bay, according to the Canadian Hurricane Centre. In Quebec, gusts reached 87 km/h in Laval and Orleans.
The Maritimes could see more than 50 millimetres of rain through Wednesday as Sandy moves east, but most of its precipitation will be from an unrelated system on Sandy’s fringes, according to Environment Canada.
Warning preparedness meteorologist Geoff Coulson said the worst may appear to have passed for most of the central and eastern provinces, but the clouds aren’t parting just yet.
“It’s going to continue to linger because of the slow-moving nature of the storm at this point,” he said.
“We’re still going to be dealing with on and off shower activity through much of southern Ontario and southern Quebec during the course of the next few days.”
The storm — which was centred over western Pennsylvania late Tuesday morning — is expected to drift north then east, fading away over the St. Lawrence Valley on Thursday, Coulson said.
“For the trick-or-treaters [Wednesday] evening — still dealing with that on-off shower activity and at least in southern Ontario temperatures a little cooler than seasonal by the time the kids head out,” he said.
Sandy began its path of destruction in the Caribbean, where 69 people were killed.
Monday evening it made landfall in New Jersey, where it cut off modern communication and left millions without power.
AP Photo/Charles SykesA parking lot full of yellow cabs is flooded as a result of superstorm Sandy on Tuesday in Hoboken, NJ.
The storm inched inland across Pennsylvania, ready to bank toward western New York to dump more of its water and likely cause more havoc Tuesday night. Behind it: a dazed, inundated New York City, a waterlogged Atlantic Coast and a moonscape of disarray and debris — from unmoored shore-town boardwalks to submerged mass-transit systems to delicate presidential politics.
“Nature,” said New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, assessing the damage to his city, “is an awful lot more powerful than we are.”
More than 8.2 million households were without power in 17 states as far west as Michigan. Nearly 2 million of those were in New York, where large swaths of lower Manhattan lost electricity and entire streets ended up under water — as did seven subway tunnels between Manhattan and Brooklyn at one point, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said. The New York Stock Exchange was closed for a second day from weather, the first time that has happened since a blizzard in 1888. The city’s subway system, the lifeblood of more than 5 million residents, was damaged like never before and closed indefinitely, and Consolidated Edison said electricity in and around New York could take a week to restore.
REUTERS/Lucas JacksonA damaged house is seen after Sandy passed through in Atlantique on Fire Island, New York, Tuesday.
“Everybody knew it was coming. Unfortunately, it was everything they said it was,” said Sal Novello, a construction executive who rode out the storm with his wife, Lori, in the Long Island town of Lindenhurst, and ended up with 7 feet of water in the basement.
The scope of the storm’s damage wasn’t known yet. Though early predictions of river flooding in Sandy’s inland path were petering out, colder temperatures made snow the main product of Sandy’s slow march from the sea. Parts of the West Virginia mountains were blanketed with two feet of snow by Tuesday afternoon, and drifts four feet deep were reported at Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee-North Carolina border.
With Election Day a week away, the storm also threatened to affect the presidential campaign. Federal disaster response, always a dicey political issue, has become even thornier since government mismanagement of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. And poll access and voter turnout, both of which hinge upon how people are impacted by the storm, could help shift the outcome in an extremely close race.
As organized civilization came roaring back Tuesday in the form of emergency response, recharged cellphones and the reassurance of daylight, harrowing stories and pastiches emerged from Maryland north to Rhode Island in the hours after Sandy’s howling winds and tidal surges shoved water over seaside barriers, into low-lying streets and up from coastal storm drains.
Images from around the storm-affected areas depicted scenes reminiscent of big-budget disaster movies. In Atlantic City, N.J., a gaping hole remained where once a stretch of boardwalk sat by the sea. In Queens, N.Y., rubble from a fire that destroyed as many as 100 houses in an evacuated beachfront neighborhood jutted into the air at ugly angles against a gray sky. In heavily flooded Hoboken, N.J., across the Hudson River from Manhattan, dozens of yellow cabs sat parked in rows, submerged in murky water to their windshields. At the ground zero construction site in lower Manhattan, sea water rushed into a gaping hole under harsh floodlights.
AP Photo/ Metropolitan Transportation AuthorityThe South Ferry subway station in New York after it was flooded by seawater.
One of the most dramatic tales came from lower Manhattan, where a failed backup generator forced New York University’s Tisch Hospital to relocate more than 200 patients, including 20 babies from neonatal intensive care. Dozens of ambulances lined up in the rainy night and the tiny patients were gingerly moved out, some attached to battery-powered respirators as gusts of wind blew their blankets.
In Moonachie, N.J., 16 km north of Manhattan, water rose to 1.5 metres within 45 minutes and trapped residents who thought the worst of the storm had passed. Mobile-home park resident Juan Allen said water overflowed a .5 metre wall along a nearby creek, filling the area with a metre of water within 15 minutes. “I saw trees not just knocked down but ripped right out of the ground,” he said. “I watched a tree crush a guy’s house like a wet sponge.”
In a measure of its massive size, waves on southern Lake Michigan rose to a record-tying 6.2 metres. High winds spinning off Sandy’s edges clobbered the Cleveland area early Tuesday, uprooting trees, closing schools and flooding major roads along Lake Erie.
Most along the East Coast, though, grappled with an experience like Bertha Weismann of Bridgeport, Conn.— frightening, inconvenient and financially problematic but, overall, endurable. Her garage was flooded and she lost power, but she was grateful. “I feel like we are blessed,” she said. “It could have been worse.”
The presidential candidates’ campaign maneuverings Tuesday revealed the delicacy of the need to look presidential in a crisis without appearing to capitalize on a disaster. President Barack Obama canceled a third straight day of campaigning, scratching events scheduled for Wednesday in swing-state Ohio, in Sandy’s path. Republican Mitt Romney resumed his campaign with plans for an Ohio rally billed as a “storm relief event.”
This is the biggest challenge we’ve ever had
And the weather posed challenges a week out for how to get everyone out to vote. On the hard-hit New Jersey coastline, a county elections chief said some polling places on barrier islands will be unusable and have to be moved.
“This is the biggest challenge we’ve ever had,” said George R. Gilmore, chairman of the Ocean County Board of Elections.
Forecasting firm IHS Global Insight predicted the storm will end up causing about $20-billion in damages and $10-billion to $30-billion in lost business. Another firm, AIR Worldwide, estimated losses up to $15-billion — big numbers probably offset by reconstruction and repairs that will contribute to longer-term growth.
“The biggest problem is not the first few days but the coming months,” said Alan Rubin, an expert in nature disaster recovery.
Files from Allison Jones of The Canadian Press and Ted Anthony of The Associated Press
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