Hurricane Sandy: Tens of thousands already without power
Matt Moran, a trimmer with Townsend Tree Service, cuts a fallen tree limb from a power line on 19th Avenue that fell as a result of the strong winds from Hurricane Sandy, Monday, Oct., 29, 2012, in Sea Cliff, N.Y. / AP PHOTO/KATHY KMONICEK
Last Updated 12:36 p.m. ET
Hours before Hurricane Sandy makes landfall, utilities have already reported power outages for customers in several states. More than 67,000 customers were without power in Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, and several other states.
Connecticut
Connecticut Light & Power (which offers outrage reports in both map and tableformats) says about 16,200 customers were without power Monday.
Delaware
Delmarva reports about 1,500 customers without power.
Maryland
BGE reports restoring service to about 4,000 customers Monday; about 2,300 are still without power.
Additional scattered outages were reported by Mon Power and Potomac Edison, and by PEPCO.
Massachusetts
NStar reported about 2,500 outages Monday morning. National Grid had fewer than 1,000 outages, down from about 5,200 earlier in the morning.
New Jersey
More than 24,400 customers in the Garden State are without power.
Public Service Electric & Gas, which is tweeting outage information, says 2,100 customers are offline. Jersey Central Power & Light, whichpublishes map of outages, is reporting 16,800 homes are without power. Atlantic City Electrichas about 5,500 outages,
New York
LILCO reports more than 21,000 customers on Long Island were without power Monday morning. Con Edison reports at least 2,000 customers in New York City and in Westchester County are without power.
In Upstate New York NYSE&G reports 3,900 customers affected.
North Carolina
Duke Energy reports more than 4,100 customers without power. Progress Energyreports more than 1,100 customers without power Monday morning.
Pennsylvania
PPL Electric Utilities reports more than 2,100 customers without power in eastern Pennsylvania.
Rhode Island
National Grid says about 2,600 customers had lost power by around 9 a.m. Monday.
Virginia
Dominion Virginia says it has restored power to about 3,000 customers by early Monday; about 2,000 remain without service.
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Hurricane Sandy: Monday's Rare NYSE, Nasdaq Closing Likely To Last Through Tuesday
NEW YORK, N.Y.--Construction workers carry boards of wood to cover air vents that could cause the New York subway system to flood in preparation for Hurricane Sandy on October 28, 2012 in New York City. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
U.S. trading came to a halt this morning, as exchanges across the country ended early or didn’t open at all. The pause come hours before Hurricane Sandy even made landfall, raising the odds that the exchanges will stay closed tomorrow.
“It’s hard to imagine that we would open tomorrow,” NYSE Euronext CEO Duncan Niederauer told CNBC.
Originally, the NYSE hoped to shift trading to its electronic NYSE Arca exchange, which is not based near New York. The Nasdaq, already an electronic platform, had intended to stay open as well. The decisions came just before midnight on the East Coast, and officials say they later today will make a decision about whether to stay closed tomorrow. Bond markets will end trading early today at noon.
The shuttering of the two exchanges will halt U.S. stock trading and mark an unusual occurrence; significantly, the move to Arca would have meant the first time that the NYSE operated as an all-electronic exchange. It is the first time in 27 years, for example, that the NYSE will stay closed for weather. The NYSE opened the day after Tropical Storm Irene’s Sunday arrival last year: This time, the major difference is that Hurricane Sandy will hit on a Monday, and transportation will stay offline, a NYSE spokesman told FORBES.
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Hurricane Sandy delivers high winds and torrential rain
Storm destroys downtown pier in Ocean City
Hurricane Sandy sent powerful waves crashing onto the boardwalk in Ocean City, Maryland.
As Hurricane Sandy pounds the mid-Atlantic coast Monday, the Baltimore region is bracing for gale-force winds and flooding.
The area remains under a flood watch through Tuesday evening, with coastal flooding expected late Monday into Wednesday morning, according to the National Weather Service. Heavy rain, as much as six inches, and high winds, with gusts as much as 70 miles per hour, will occur throughout Monday afternoon and well into Tuesday, according to forecasters.
Gov. Martin O'Malley warned of the danger of the storm Monday. "There will be people who will die and are killed in this storm," the governor said while visiting the Maryland Emergency Management Agency. "Stay off the roads, hunker down with your families."
READ MORE: http://www.baltimoresun.com
Waves pound, winds whip, residents hunker down as Hurricane Sandy hits state
Bill Greene/Globe Staff
Jillian Webb and Arianna Corso of Dennis braved the elements to go to Lighthouse Beach in Chatham today, where Hurricane Sandy pelted them with wind and sand.
Waves are pounding the shores and winds are whipping through the trees this morning as the effects of Hurricane Sandy slowly intensify in Massachusetts. With coastal flooding expected, officials warned people in several seaside communities to evacuate.
Residents are hunkering down at home, with schools, state and federal government offices, and many businesses closed. Roads are emptier than usual, and the state highway department urged truckers to “seek refuge at secure locations.” The MBTA also announced that it would discontinue all service at 2 p.m.
More than 17,000 electric customers across Eastern Massachusetts had lost power at about noon today. The latest National Grid power outage map shows more than 9,000 customers affected. NStar is reporting more than 6,200 customers without power. “We have close to a thousand crews working on storm restoration,” Caroline Pretyman, NStar spokeswoman, said in an e-mail. Unitil is reporting more than 1,000 customers are without power.
The state is at the outer edges of a “superstorm” that is expected to crash into the mid-Atlantic states later today. The storm, which had been steaming north through the ocean, has made a westward turn and is zeroing in on the coast, according to the National Weather Service.
As of 11 a.m. today, the storm was about 260 miles southeast of New York City, expected to make landfall near Cape May, N.J., at 11 p.m. Exactly where the landfill will happen is still uncertain, said weather service meteorologist Charlie Foley. “It’s kind of like a wait and see,” he said. “It has made its left turn, but where it makes landfall isn’t exactly definitive.”
Sandy is a Category 1 hurricane carrying 90-mile-per-hour winds. The storm is moving north-northwest at 18 miles per hour, according to the National Hurricane Center. Forecasters have urged the public not to underestimate its strength even hundreds of miles away from where it makes landfall.
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Romney Scraps Monday Night and Tuesday Campaigning
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is curtailing his campaign schedule as Hurricane Sandy bears down on the Eastern seaboard, canceling planned appearances Monday night and all day Tuesday.
Campaign officials say vice presidential running mate Paul Ryan will also scrap campaign rallies during the same time frame.
AP
Republican presidential candidate and former... View Full Caption
The decision was announced a short while after President Barack Obama canceled a planned rally in Florida to fly back to Washington, where aides said he would oversee the government's response to the threat posed by the storm.
Romney intends to go ahead with speeches today in Ohio and Iowa before he begins observing his self-imposed storm-related moratorium on campaigning.
The former Massachusetts governor and Obama are locked in a close race, eight days before Election Day.
Combine
By rights, Hurricane Sandy ought never to have had a chance to form. Back in May, just before the 2012 hurricane season began, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration said this was likely to be an average year, with perhaps nine to 15 named storms.
Instead, there have been 19 — 10 of them hurricanes — and it is not over yet. In terms of numbers of storms, this will go down as the third busiest Atlantic hurricane season since record-keeping began in 1851, exceeded only by 2005 (the off-the-charts year of Katrina) and 1933.
So what happened? The original outlook by NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center was about as accurate as it could have been at the time, all the way back last spring. But the oceans and the atmosphere make for a complex system, and the Northeast is suffering now because of patterns that formed as far away is Indonesia.
In the air over southeastern Asia is a phenomenon called the Madden-Julian Oscillation, or MJO — air currents that can shift back and forth in 30 cycles of 30 to 60 days. It usually means very little to Americans, as it mostly affects Asian monsoons. But late this summer it shifted to feed increased amounts of warm, moist air to the east, toward the Pacific, and ultimately toward the United States.
“We had a busy start to the hurricane season — 13 named storms by the end of September, though only Isaac did anything to the U.S.,” said Paul Knight, a meteorologist at Penn State University. “After that there was a lull. Then the MJO began to act up.”
On top of it, there was El Nino, the giant strip of warm water in the Pacific that periodically forms along the equator, rearranging jet streams that flow over it. An El Nino began to weaken just in the past few months — bad news for people along the Atlantic 10,000 miles away. For lack of a strong El Nino, there were not the usual high-level air currents that would help break hurricanes apart as they tried to move toward the U.S. coastline.
With just two weeks left to craft a deficit reduction package, members of the bipartisan Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction remain far from a deal, this according to both Democratic and Republican aides close to the negotiations.
