“There have been stronger winds in other storms before, and there have been heavier winds in other storms before, but in terms of how large the storm itself was, how low the pressure was .. people haven’t seen a storm like this,” Klein said.
Klein said the storm, which moved slowly up the coast as it headed northeast, dropped nearly 2 feet of snow on the high mountain areas of Virginia and Maryland. Working further inland the storm’s wind and rains subsided, he said, but the devastation is widespread.
Klein noted that New Jersey and New York experienced stronger storm surges and flooding than regions in the south due to the counterclockwise spin on the northern face of the hurricane as it crossed the coast.
“We had winds coming out of the Chesapeake Bay whereas they were north of the storm so they had winds coming onshore and water piling up there,” he said.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said Hurricane Sandy had hit the state hard.
“The devastation is unprecedented, like nothing we’ve ever seen reported before,” he said at a morning press conference Tuesday.
Atlantic City, a coastal casino town right in the path of the storm, was one of the areas most impacted.
Approximately 70 to 80 percent of the city was underwater Tuesday morning and some houses in the region were literally moved off their blocks. “I didn’t expect it to be that bad. I didn’t expect we would see homes off of their foundations and in the middle of state highways,” Christie said.
New York City was also heavily impacted, with low-lying areas flooded, including Wall Street and the new World Trade Center (WTC).
“We had to run out of there last night,” a construction worker at the WTC site said. “It’s all underwater, second level, all the way up.”
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg described Sandy as a “a storm of unprecedented proportions.”
The MTA subway and other transport systems remained closed Tuesday. According to New York power company Consolidated Edison, around 680,000 customers were without power in the New York City region.
Bloomberg said the two biggest challenges facing the city were restoring the transit system and power.
“Our administration will move heaven and earth to help MTA and Con Ed,” Bloomberg said at a press conference Oct. 30.
‘Just a Little Water’
For Lower Manhattan resident Debbie Lougee, the storm was just another part of living in the Big Apple, her building still connected to gas and water but without power.
“We’re 9/11 survivors, so this is just a little water,” she said with a hint of New York humor.
Describing the flooded Brooklyn Battery Tunnel she said, “It was like a waterfall. ... You could have done white water rafting in there.”
Sandy was not as intense as the early derecho storms that wiped out power for thousands of people for days in June, but it was wide and slow moving.
All transport systems and services remained closed in Washington, D.C., as of Tuesday. In Maryland over 250,000 were without power, according to Ed McDonough, spokesman for the Maryland Emergency Management Agency.
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