UPDATE: HURRICANE SANDY U.S. DEATH TOLL TOPS 50
Now “post-tropical” storm Sandy is being blamed for 13 deaths, claiming victims in New York, New Jersey, West Virginia, North Carolina and Connecticut.
The latest death was reported at about 11 p.m.,w hen a man died in Hawthorne, N.J. after a tree fell on his house earlier that evening, Fire Chief Joseph Speranza said. The death toll includes three from New Jersey and five from New York. The superstorm also killed at least 67 people in the Caribbean as it moved north, with 51 of those deaths in Haiti.
The flooding stretched for blocks inward in Atlantic City as it officially came ashore at about 8 p.m. Monday night, ripping up part of the Boardwalk, and its storm surge set records in lower Manhattan, where power went off and darkened much of one the world’s most famous skylines.
Atlantic City Mayor Lorenzo Langford told CNN that there were still people who didn’t heed instructions to evacuate, encouraging people who stayed to “hunker down and try to wait this thing out.”
The tide tonight at lower Manhattan’s Battery Park was at 14 feet, eclipsing a record set by Hurricane Donna in 1960 by more than three feet. All three major airports remain closed tonight, and the storm is being blamed for more than 2.8 million power outages across its path.
About 250,000 of those were in lower Manhattan, which lost power as water got into the substation and when Con Edison cut power to protect underground equipment as the water rose.