Hurricane Sandy Pummels East Coast

Skooter reporting 10/30/12

A gargantuan storm hammered into the coast of New Jersey on Monday evening, its powerful burst and storm surges causing flooding in coastal communities, blowing down trees and power lines and leaving more than 100,000 people in the rain-saturated dark across a large area of the Eastern Seaboard.

At about 8 p.m., the storm hit close to Atlantic City, N. J. with maximum sustained winds of about 80 miles per hour, heading north-northwest at 23 miles per hour, the National Hurricane Center said. A few moments earlier, the National Hurricane Center reclassified the storm: Hurricane Sandy develop into a post-tropical cyclone, a scientific renaming that had no impact on the powerful winds, driving rains and life-threatening storm surge that would likely accompany its thrust onto land.

The massive and heartless storm unpredictably gained speed as it howled over the Atlantic Ocean on a slate-gray day and went on to immobilize life for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states, with widespread evacuations that turned waterfront neighborhoods into ghost towns.

The wind-powered rain beat sea walls and protective obstacles in places like Atlantic City, where the Boardwalk was devastated as water pushed its way inland. Foam was spewing out and the sand surrendered to the waves along the beach at Sandy Hook, N.J., at the entrance to New York Harbor. Water was over knee deep on the streets in Sea Bright, N.J., a three-mile sand-flake of a town where the ocean met the Shrewsbury River.

NYT