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This Article is From Aug 29, 2011

US: Hurricane Irene weakens, sweeps Northward

US: Hurricane Irene weakens, sweeps Northward
New York: As Tropical Storm Irene drenched New York and New England on Sunday, the states where the hurricane first made landfall faced a sun-drenched - yet often powerless - day to assess loss of life, property damage and widespread inconvenience that, while significant, fell short of the worst forecasts of catastrophe.

The three-day count of deaths related to the storm rose to at least 16 in six states, with five fatalities reported in North Carolina, four in Virginia, three in New Jersey, two in Florida and one each in Maryland and Connecticut, according to state and federal officials. Widespread flooding of a main road prevented the reoccupation of Hatteras Island on North Carolina's Outer Banks, leaving hundreds of people temporarily stranded and awaiting supplies by ferry.

High water inundated houses and washed out roads up and down the coast, and officials said they had rescued 76 people from rising water in North Carolina alone. Some rivers in Virginia, meanwhile, were not expected to crest until Tuesday. Millions of electric customers, including three-fourths of the city of Richmond, Va., were without power on Sunday, and state leaders warned that full restoration could take up to a week.

Father north, Gov. Peter Shumlin of Vermont said on Sunday afternoon that the storm's weakening remnants were producing "devastating flooding" across a broad swath of his saturated state. "Downtown Brattleboro is totally underwater," Mr. Shumlin said. "It's not just small water - it's five or six feet."

Capt. Ray Keefe of the Vermont State Police said torrential flooding in southern Vermont was "epic" and advised those stranded "to get up to the highest point of their residence because we just can't get to them right now."

Yet despite the soggy devastation, the sentiment along much of Hurricane Irene's path was that it could have been much worse.

In North Carolina, Sgt. James Cutrell of the Tyrrell County Sheriff's Department said he had never seen greater flooding in the flatlands along Albemarle Sound, recalling that he had waded home Saturday in water up to his waist. His department had to rescue dozens of residents from their houses that day, he said.

But he was thankful that the storm, which made landfall at Cape Lookout, N.C., on Saturday morning as a slow-moving Category 1 hurricane with winds of 85 miles per hour, had lost at least 30 miles of wind speed before slogging into the coast.

"If we'd have had those 100-mile-per-hour-plus winds," Sergeant Cutrell said, "we'd have really had a mess."

As it was, there was plenty of mess, and darkness. Virginia reported the second largest power failure in the state's history, affecting 2.5 million people from Hampton Roads to the suburbs of Washington. There were 800,000 people without power in Maryland and half a million in North Carolina. In that state, 225 roads and 21 bridges were closed.

In Philadelphia, which lies between the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, water levels in some areas were 15 feet above normal on Sunday and were approaching the 17-foot record set in 1869, said Mark McDonald, a spokesman for Mayor Michael Nutter.

The storm, which dumped at least six inches of rain on the city, caused the collapse of seven buildings, Mr. McDonald said, including a six-story structure just south of Center City. No one was injured, but 20 residents had to be evacuated. In one neighborhood on the Schuylkill, employees of the Mad River Bar & Grille watched the water inch up Main Street from their stoop until it became an island.

The bar's general manager, Joe Decandido, 28, said his employees kept moving equipment and merchandise to higher ground but could not outrun the water rising in the basement. "You feel like you're in the Titanic," Mr. Decandido said. "It keeps rising, and there's not much you can do."

The causes of death included drownings, falling trees, car accidents and fires. Some bordered on the gruesome. In New Jersey, a 20-year-old woman was found dead in her submerged car at 9:30 a.m. Sunday on a flooded rural road, eight hours after she called the police to say she was trapped in her vehicle with water up to her neck, the state police said. In Vermont, Governor Shumlin said rescuers were having trouble getting to a river where a woman, now feared dead, had been reported by her boyfriend to have been swept downstream.

After days of dire warnings, mandatory evacuations and shuttered transit systems, state and federal officials resisted any notion that they had exaggerated either the threat from the hurricane or the need for precautions.

"People say we've dodged a bullet, but we've lost lives," said W. Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. "I don't think you can say that's dodging a bullet." He added: "You don't get a second chance."

The secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, encouraged drivers in affected areas to stay off the roads so that crews could work on removing debris and repairing power lines.

Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia pointed out that in past hurricanes, many fatalities occurred after the rains had cleared because of poor driving conditions, contact with downed power lines and overexertion during the cleanup. "While the storm has passed," Mr. McDonnell warned at a news conference, "the dangers have not."

Late Saturday night, one of two reactors at the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Plant in Lusby, Md., automatically went off line after wind gusts flung a strip of aluminum siding into a transformer. The plant is located about halfway up the western shore of Chesapeake Bay. A second unit remained at full power, and there was no impact on customers, according to Mark Sullivan, a spokesman for Constellation Energy Nuclear Group, which operates the plant.

Mr. Sullivan said the plant's safety systems had worked as designed when a sensor detected the contact and shut down Unit 1 at 11:02 p.m. The company declared an "unusual event," the lowest of four emergency classifications set by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

"As dawn breaks, all employees are safe and the Calvert Cliffs facility is safe," Mr. Sullivan said on Sunday morning. "We have no other significant damage, and the site is accessible."

There were reports of tornadoes in several states. Late Friday night, a tornado ripped through Tyrrell County, N.C., destroying nine homes and distributing their contents over a rain-soaked soybean field. On Sunday morning, residents and their relatives were hugging and crying on the side of the road.

Calvin Hill, a 44-year-old volunteer firefighter, said he had heard about the tornado while staying at a nearby church shelter and rushed to the scene with the fire department, only to find his own house disemboweled under a driving rain.

It was too early for officials to make meaningful damage assessments in most places. Just across the bay from the Cape Lookout National Seashore, in aptly named Sealevel, which locals refer to as "the place God ran out of dirt," there was topsy-turvy evidence of Saturday's six feet of flooding, said John Fulcher, who runs a recreational vehicle park there. "We've got boats, campers and everything just all mixed together," Mr. Fulcher said. "It's a mess."

Seasoned hurricane watchers along the North Carolina coast said the storm had been notable more for the duration and direction of its winds than for their ferocity. Although the hurricane whipped up punishing waves along the Outer Banks, the flooding on the coast was not nearly as severe as along the Albemarle and Pamlico Sounds, which separate the barrier islands from the mainland.

Outer Banks residents spoke of Jet Skis, small boats and cars strewn across streets and around elevated houses, pushed about by the surge on the sound side of the fingerling islands. Most of the debris washed in after the eye of the storm passed and the wind switched direction, pushing water across the sounds. Some who live near the water on the mainland inspected their homes on Saturday evening and breathed relief, only to return on Sunday morning and find them sitting in four or five feet of water.

"The beach was pretty bad, but the sound just came up and attacked," said Adam Anderson, 25, a monster-truck driver who lives in Powells Point, N.C. "Worst I've seen, and I've been here all my life."

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