Tropical Storm Irene: Flood Worries And Some Relief In Irene’s Wake

The storm that had been Hurricane Irene crossed into Canada overnight
but wasn’t yet through with the U.S., where flood waters threatened
Vermont towns and New Yorkers feared a commuting nightmare as their
transit system, shut down ahead of the storm, was slowly restored.

The storm left millions without power across much of the Eastern
Seaboard, left more than 20 dead and forced airlines to cancel about
9,000 flights. It never became the big-city nightmare forecasters and
public officials had warned about, but it still had the ability to
surprise.

Many of the worst effects arose from rains that fell inland, not the
highly anticipated storm surge along the coasts. Residents of
Pennsylvania and New Jersey nervously watched waters rise as hours’
worth of rain funneled into rivers and creeks. Normally narrow ribbons
of water turned into raging torrents in Vermont and upstate New York
late Sunday, tumbling with tree limbs, cars and parts of bridges.

“This is not over,” President Barack Obama said from the Rose Garden.

Hundreds of Vermonters were told to leave their homes after Irene
dumped several inches of rain on the landlocked state. Video posted on
Facebook showed a 141-year-old covered bridge in Rockingham swept away
by the roiling, muddy Williams River. In another video, an empty car
somersaulted down a river in Bennington.

“It’s pretty fierce. I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Michelle
Guevin, who spoke from a Brattleboro restaurant after leaving her home
in nearby Newfane. She said the fast-moving Rock River was washing out
the road to her house.

Green Mountain Power decided against flooding Montpelier, the
capital, to save the earthen Marshfield Dam, about 20 miles up the
Winooski River to the northeast. Water levels had stabilized Monday
morning but engineers were continuing to monitor the situation, said
spokeswoman Dorothy Schnure.

Residents of 350 households were asked to leave as a precaution.

Nearly 5 million homes and businesses lost power at some point during
the storm. Lights started to come back on for many on Sunday, though it
was expected to take days for electricity to be fully restored.

Only about 50,000 power customers in New York City went dark, but
people there had something else to worry about: getting to work Monday.

The metropolitan area’s transit system, shut down because of weather
for the first time in its history, was taking many hours to get back on
line. Limited bus service began Sunday and New York subway service was
to be partially restored at 6 a.m. Monday, but riders were warned to
expect long lines and long waits.

Commuter rail service to Long Island and New Jersey was being
partially restored, but the Metro-North Railroad to Westchester County
and Connecticut was suspended because of flooding and mudslides.

Airports in New York and around the Northeast were reopening to a
backlog of hundreds of thousands of passengers whose flights were
canceled over the weekend.

Some of New York’s yellow cabs were up to their wheel wells in water,
and water rushed over a marina near the New York Mercantile Exchange,
where gold and oil are traded. But the New York flooding was not
extensive from Irene, whose eye passed over Coney Island and Central
Park.

The New York Stock Exchange said it would be open for business on
Monday, and the Sept. 11 memorial at the World Trade Center site didn’t
lose a single tree.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended his decision to order 370,000
residents to evacuate their homes in low-lying areas, saying it was
impossible to know just how powerful the storm would be. “We were just
unwilling to risk the life of a single New Yorker,” he said.

Irene had at one time been a major hurricane, with winds higher than
110 mph as it headed toward the U.S. It was a tropical storm with 65 mph
winds by the time it hit New York. It lost the characteristics of a
tropical storm and had slowed to 50 mph by the time it reached Canada.

Chris Fogarty, director of the Canadian Hurricane Centre, warned of
flooding and wind damage in eastern Canada and said the heaviest
rainfall was expected in Quebec, where about 250,000 homes were without
power.

At least 21 people died in the U.S., most of them when trees crashed
through roofs or onto cars. One Vermont woman was swept away and feared
drowned in the Deerfield River.

Officials worked to repair hundreds of damaged roads, and power companies picked through uprooted trees and reconnected lines.

One private estimate put damage along the coast at $7 billion, far from any record for a natural disaster.

Twenty homes on Long Island Sound in Connecticut were destroyed by
churning surf. The torrential rain chased hundreds of people in upstate
New York from their homes and closed 137 miles of the state’s main
highway.

Authorities in and around Easton, Pa., kept a close eye on the rising
Delaware River. The National Weather Service forecast the river to
crest there at 30 feet, well above normal flood stage.

In the South, authorities still were not sure how much damage had been done but expressed relief that it wasn’t worse.

“Thank God it weakened a little bit,” said Virginia Gov. Bob
McDonnell, who toured a hard-hit Richmond neighborhood where large,
old-growth trees uprooted and crushed houses and automobiles.

In Norfolk, Va., where storm surges got within inches of breaking a
record, most of the water had receded by Sunday. There was isolated
flooding and downed trees, but nowhere near the damage officials
predicted.

“We can’t believe a hurricane came through here,” city spokeswoman Lori Crouch said.

In North Carolina, where six people were killed, the infrastructure
losses included the only road to the seven villages on Hatteras Island.

“Overall, the destruction is not as severe as I was worried it might
be, but there is still lots and lots of destruction and people’s lives
are turned upside down,” Gov. Beverly Perdue said in Kill Devil Hills.

In an early estimate, consulting firm Kinetic Analysis Corp. figured
total losses from the storm at $7 billion, with insured losses of $2
billion to $3 billion. The storm will take a bite out of Labor Day
tourist business from the Outer Banks to the Jersey Shore to Cape Cod.

Irene was the first hurricane to make landfall in the continental
United States since 2008, and came almost six years to the day after
Katrina ravaged New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005.