6.4 magnitude aftershock hits south of Haida Gwaii after 7.7 earthquake; no tsunami alert issued

Second largest earthquake to hit Canada since 1949

VANCOUVER — The Haida Gwaii region continues to feel the aftershocks of a violent earthquake measuring 7.7 that jolted British Columbia’s north-central coast Saturday night, frightening residents and forcing many to temporarily leave their homes for higher ground ahead of a possible tsunami.

The largest, a 6.4 magnitude tremor, struck Sunday afternoon, 136 kilometers south of Masset. There have been over 40 aftershocks in the area.

Tsunami warnings were issued for the North Coast Saturday, the Haida Gwaii islands, parts of the central B.C. coast, the coast of Alaska and as far away as Hawaii.

Early Sunday morning the warnings were downgraded to advisory status, meaning evacuations were no longer necessary, and they were cancelled altogether a few hours later.

Residents near the centre of the quake said the violent jolting lasted for up to a minute, but no injuries or major damage had been reported.

Carsten Ginsburg, who lives in the small community of Bella Coola southeast of Prince Rupert, said the quake lasted about 40 seconds.

“It shook everything. The electricity went out, the power lines were swinging all over the place and stuff was falling off the shelves.”

Brent Ward, an earth scientist at Simon Fraser University, said the earthquake was the second largest to hit the country since 1949, when another earthquake was recorded in the same area with a magnitude of 8.1.

“It’s an earthquake in an area that gets a lot of earthquakes,” he said. “It’s a tectonically active area.”

Ward said the area is known as the Queen Charlotte fault, where the earth’s plates slide horizontally across each other in a strike-slip action, similar to what happens along California’s San Andreas fault.

“Stresses build up because of that movement, and every so often we get the release of that stress in the form of an earthquake.”

Ward said he wasn’t surprised the tsunami warning was shortlived because the strike-slip movement along the fault doesn’t generally trigger tsunamis.

“To trigger a tsunami you need to have a vertical movement of the sea floor, and it’s that vertical movement that displaces water and triggers the tsunami,” he said. “Because it’s sliding across each other, you’re not generally moving the water.”

In fact, hours after the earthquake, Dennis Sinnott, who works at the Institute of Ocean Sciences, said the largest wave hit Langara Island, a northern Haida Gwaii island, and measured just 69 centimetres.

The quake also set off emergency sirens across the Pacific on the islands of Hawaii, but even as people were moving to higher ground, the warning was called off.

In Alaska, the wave surge was just 10 centimetres, much smaller than officials had been forecasting.

Kelli Kryzanowski, manager of strategic initiatives Emergency Management B.C., said the initial earthquake occurred at 8:04 p.m. inland on Haida Gwaii and was initially recorded at a magnitude of 7.1 but was quickly upgraded to a magnitude of 7.7.

Kryzanowski said small waves generated by the quake, measured at 28 centimetres and 44 centimetres, also hit the northern tip of Vancouver Island.

“What we’re seeing at this time are relatively small sea-level fluctuations,” she said.

B.C. Justice Minister Shirley Bond said there appeared to be little damage from the quake.

“We’re certainly grateful at this point,” said Bond, who spoke to reporters during a late night conference call. “We’re very grateful for that, but we’ll wait until we can actually see the impact.”

After the quake, Ginsburg said he ran home as quickly as he could to see if there was a tsunami warning.

“Which of course there was,” he added.

Ginsburg owns the Float House Inn on the public wharf in Bella Coola and had about six customers celebrating a birthday party.

They all evacuated to about 35 metres above sea level.

“I’m assuming that it’s OK,” he said laughing. “I’m keeping my fingers crossed.”

Bella Coola resident Barb Cornish, 60, said she considers herself a very calm person.

“But I found it quite unnerving,” she told The Canadian Press.

Cornish lives in a log house and had been told that it’s one of the safest places to be in the event of an earthquake.

But she said it sure didn’t feel safe Saturday night.

“The log house swayed and creaked and my light over my kitchen table was swaying, some chimes went off. I stood up and I could feel the undulations under my feet, to the point where I almost got nauseated.”

Geoff Ray said he has felt a lot of earthquakes, but this was the most powerful quake he’s ever experienced in the 37 years he’s lived on Haida Gwaii.

Ray operates the Breezeway Accommodations bed and breakfast in Queen Charlotte City and said the beams of his building were “visibly shaking quite a lot, there were things falling off shelves.”

“(It was) an exciting experience, there’s no doubt about that.”

Lenore Lawrence, a resident of Queen Charlotte City, said the quake was “definitely scary,” adding she wondered if “this could be the big one.”

She thought the shaking lasted more than a minute.

While several things fell off her mantle and broke, she said damage in her home was minimal.

Residents rushed out of their homes in Tofino when the tsunami sirens sounded, but they were allowed to return about two hours after the quake.

Yvette Drews, a resident of Tofino, said she ran out of her home with her two children and mother in-law and drove to a local school when she heard the community’s tsunami sirens go off.

They were told by police that they could return home.

But while on the way home, Drews said she heard the tsunami sirens go off again.

“Well that just freaked me out, hearing the siren and the voice,” she said.

The quake shook Vancouver Island, the Haida Gwaii area, Prince Rupert, Quesnel and Houston, and was even felt in Metro Vancouver and Alaska.

“It’s a good wake-up call for everyone to make sure they have an earthquake kit and a plan if an earthquake like this hits an area that they live,” said Ward.

VANCOUVER—The second largest earthquake in Canadian history was still rattling nerves Sunday, with aftershocks off the northern coast of British Columbia.

On Saturday night, a massive 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit about 30 kilometres north of Sandspit, B.C., in the Haida Gwaii islands shortly after 8 p.m. local time, sending tremors north through the island chain and south as far as Metro Vancouver.

It was the largest earthquake to be felt in Canada since an 8.1-magnitude quake in the same region back in 1949.

A surprisingly strong 6.4-magnitude aftershock in the same area shook residents again Sunday afternoon around 2 p.m.

Earthquake expert Brent Ward from Simon Fraser University said he expects aftershocks for days ahead, but generally in the 4- to 5-magnitude range.

“We don’t really understand how to predict earthquakes enough to know if something like this could be an indicator of a larger earthquake in the same vicinity occurring in the future,” Ward said Sunday. “If we get another earthquake that’s greater than 7.7, it wouldn’t be an aftershock, it would be a new earthquake.”

Saturday’s massive quake also caused a sleepless night for a whole section of western North America, watching and waiting for a tsunami warning to pass.

Based on historical records, earthquakes in the area of Saturday evening’s rumblings don’t generally trigger tsunamis, Ward said. But he added that evacuations are a worth the effort because tsunami waves can sweep through coastal communities with devastating consequences.

Neil Goodwin, a fishing lodge manager from Sandspit, was in his living room Saturday night when the rumbling started.

“It was the kind of shaking that if you weren’t holding onto something, you’d be on the floor,” he said. “It wasn’t very violent for probably the first 10 seconds, and then it really amped up.”

As the power cut out, Goodwin, 35, used the flashlight on his cellphone to find his two dogs and escape his house. He didn’t have time to assess the damage or find his cat.

Goodwin drove to one of two hills designated as safety point in tsunami drills, where he stood with his neighbours and watched the waves grow in size and strength.

“Within 10 minutes, pretty much 90 per cent of everyone in town was in one of the two points,” he said.

In Queen Charlotte, Canadian Coast Guard Malcolm Dunderdale spent a sleepless night in the dark after the power cut out within seconds of the shaking, which he said lasted about 30 to 45 seconds.

After gathering his cellphone, mobile radios and general tsunami kits, plus blankets and pillows, Dunderdale said, there was nothing to do but wait.

The first tsunami reached the West Coast at Langara Island, part of Haida Gwaii, at 9:16 p.m., about an hour and a half after the earthquake struck. But the waves caused no damage.

The earthquake also triggered tsunami warnings in Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California and Hawaii. The last of the tsunami advisories were lifted Sunday morning.

The biggest waves — about 1.5 metres high — appeared to hit Maui, the Associated Press reported. There were no immediate reports of damage, though one person died in a fatal crash near a road that was closed because of the threat near Oahu’s north shore.

Tremors shake up 5 districts

VIJAYAWADA: Panic spread across several villages in five districts in the state due to mild tremors on Monday. People ran out of their houses when the earth shook for a few seconds. Though no casualties were reported from any of the districts, there was panic in many places in Krishna, Guntur, Prakasam, Nalgonda, and Khammam.

There were reports of tremors even at Hayathnagar in Rangareddy district around the same time. The earth quake monitoring centre at Vijayawada termed the incident as ‘very minor’ and said there was nothing to worry about. “It’s common to experience such tremors when the rocky layers of earth make adjustments within themselves,” said RDO S Venkata Rao.

LISS – Live Internet Seismic Server

GSN Stations

These data update automatically every 30 minutes. Last update: October 29, 2012 03:19:30 UTC

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LISS – Live Internet Seismic Server

GSN Stations

These data update automatically every 30 minutes. Last update: November 1, 2012 07:48:55 UTC

Seismograms may take several moments to load. Click on a plot to see larger image.

Poás Volcano rumbles, spits ashes

The Poas Volcano early Sunday awoke residents of the province of Alajuela with a strong rumble.

At about 1 a.m., the volcano’s crater ejected mud and ash more than 500 meters into the air. Ashes traveled hundreds of meters around the national park, rangers reported.

Although the volcano is frequently active, this kind of strong explosion has not been recorded since 2006. Experts said the activity was normal, but they will continue monitoring the volcano.

Poás Volcano National Park will remain open to tourists while experts determine if there is any risk to visitors.

• 

  © The Associated Press/Dieu Nalio Chery
  Many homes remain underwater in southern Haiti.

  Huge crop losses in southern Haiti raise famine worries

• Flooding raises specter of cholera
• Crop losses in Cuba, Jamaica as well

Port-au-Prince – As Hurricane Sandy barreled toward the U.S. East Coast on Monday, the full extent of the storm’s havoc on Haiti was just beginning to emerge.

Extensive damage to crops throughout the southern third of the country, as well as the high potential for a spike in cases of cholera and other water-borne diseases, could mean Haiti will see the deadliest effects of Sandy in the coming days and weeks.

Haiti reported the highest death toll in the Caribbean, as swollen rivers and landslides claimed at least 52 lives, according to the country’s Civil Protection office. More than three days of constant rain left roads and bridges heavily damaged, cutting off access to several towns and a key border crossing with the Dominican Republic.

“The economy took a huge hit,” Prime Minister Laurent Lamothe told Reuters. He also said Sandy’s impact was devastating, “even by international standards,” adding that Haiti was planning an appeal for emergency aid.

“Most of the agricultural crops that were left from Hurricane Isaac were destroyed during Sandy,” he said, “so food security will be an issue.”

Sandy also destroyed banana crops in eastern Jamaica as well as decimating the coffee crop in eastern Cuba.

But the widespread loss of crops and supplies in the south, both for commercial growers and subsistence farmers, is what has Haitian authorities and aid organizations had worried about most.

The past several months have seen a series of nationwide protests and general strikes over the rising cost of living. Even before Hurricane Sandy hit, residents complained that food prices were too high.

© The Associated Press/Dieu Nalio Chery
Carmene Chales, left, walks with Anes Michaelange and one-year-old Alexandra Alexandre through an area where Hurricane Sandy triggered flooding in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Saturday, Oct. 27, 2012.

Peasant Crop Losses

A rise in food prices in Haiti triggered violent demonstrations and political instability in April 2008. Jean Debalio Jean-Jacques, the Ministry of Agriculture’s director for the southern department, said he worried that the massive crop loss “could aggravate the situation.”

“The storm took everything away,” said Jean-Jacques. “Everything the peasants had in reserve – corn, tubers – all of it was devastated. Some people had already prepared their fields for winter crops and those were devastated.”

In Abricots on Haiti’s southwestern tip, the community was still recovering from the effects of 2010′s Hurricane Tomas and a recent dry spell when Sandy hit.

“We’ll have famine in the coming days,” said Abricots Mayor Kechner Toussaint. “It’s an agricultural disaster.”

The main staples of the local diet, bananas and breadfruit, were ripped out by winds and ruined by heavy rains.

In the southwestern Grand Anse department, a boat that regularly comes from Port-au-Prince to deliver supplies and pick up produce to sell in the capital had not come in more than a week because of the storm. The cost of basic things, like fuel, had already jumped.

In Camp-Perrin, a mountainous region in the southwest peninsula where Sandy’s first fatality was recorded after a woman tried to cross a swollen river, coffee planters lamented the loss of a harvest they were weeks away from collecting.

“Coffee is the bank account of the peasants,” said Maurice Jean-Louis, a planter and head of a coffee growers’ cooperative in Camp-Perrin. Rain flooded many storage areas as well, soaking coffee beans that were set aside for export. He called the damage “incalculable.”

Cholera in the Capital

In the capital, Port-au-Prince, Sandy destroyed concrete homes and tent camps alike, where 370,000 victims of the 2010 earthquake are still living. Haitian authorities said 18,000 families were left homeless in the disaster.

Aid organizations began reporting a sharp rise in suspected cholera cases in several departments, with at least 86 new cases alone coming from Port-au-Prince’s earthquake survivor camps, according to Dr. Juan Carlos Gustavo Alonso of the Pan American Health Organization. Many communities are still cut off and only accessible by helicopter, he said, so the broader rise in cholera was “still too early to tell.”

Since October 2010, a cholera outbreak has sickened almost 600,000 people and killed more than 7,400 in Haiti.

Both the Haitian state and international aid organizations distributed food, water and other items to affected camps and communities throughout the weekend, including personal distributions by President Michel Martelly.

“These stocks are running dangerously low,” said George Ngwa, spokesman for OCHA, a humanitarian coordinating body in Haiti. “After Tropical Storm Isaac in August, these stocks have not been replenished. What we’re doing is scraping the bottom.”

Powerful storm kills at least 30 in Philippines, Vietnam

Boats sit in the Beilun River, which separates China and Vietnam, on Tuesday, October 30. Tropical Storm Son-Tinh was moving northeast along the northern Vietnamese coast on Monday after tearing the roofs off hundreds of houses and breaching flood defenses overnight, the state-run Vietnam News Agency reported.

A Chinese soldier hands over a Vietnamese baby he rescued from the flood to his mother at a waterlogged market near the China-Vietnam on Monday.

A man stands on a flooded road in Sanya, China, on Sunday, October 28.

An uprooted tree crushes a car in China on Sunday.

Have you been affected by Tropical Storm Son-Tinh? If so, share your images and footage with CNN iReport, but please stay safe.

Hong Kong (CNN) — As Hurricane Sandy lashes the East Coast of the United States with wind and rain, Southeast Asia is dealing with the trail of death and damage from a powerful storm that has killed at least 30 people in the region over the past few days.

Superstorm Sandy threatens ‘catastrophe’ of a lifetime

Tropical Storm Son-Tinh was moving northeast along the northern Vietnamese coast on Monday after tearing the roofs off hundreds of houses and breaching flood defenses overnight, the state-run Vietnam News Agency (VNA) reported.

Son-Tinh was at typhoon level when it thumped into northern Vietnam late Sunday with winds as strong as 133 kilometers per hour (83 mph). It left three people dead and two injured, according to an initial estimate from the Office of the National Search and Rescue Committee reported by (VNA).

More than a 1,300 rescue workers and soldiers have been deployed to work with local authorities on search and rescue efforts in the aftermath of the storm, VNA said.

Helicopters were on standby for a search and rescue mission for an oil rig with 35 people on board that became disconnected from its towboats miles out at sea amid strong waves generated by the storm, according to VNA.

And five people were missing Sunday after winds from Son-Tinh sank an engineering vessel near a cargo terminal in Sanya, a city on the southern Chinese island of Hainan, China’s state-run news agency Xinhua reported.

Son-Tinh is expected to gradually weaken over the course of Monday, regional weather agencies said. At least 260,000 people in Vietnam had been relocated to safer areas as it approached Sunday.

The storm had already killed 27 people when it swept across the central Philippines during the second half of last week, causing flash floods and landslides, according to the Philippine National Disaster Risk Reduction and Management Council. Nine people remain missing, the council said Monday.

East Asia is buffeted for several months a year by heavy storms that roll in from the western Pacific Ocean. In August, a big typhoon, named Bolaven, killed more than 60 people on the Korean peninsula.

Storm Barrels Through Region, Leaving Destructive Path

The mammoth and merciless storm made landfall near Atlantic City around 8 p.m., with maximum sustained winds of about 80 miles per hour, the National Hurricane Center said. That was shortly after the center had reclassified the storm as a post-tropical cyclone, a scientific renaming that had no bearing on the powerful winds, driving rains and life-threatening storm surge expected to accompany its push onto land.

The storm had unexpectedly picked up speed as it roared over the Atlantic Ocean on a slate-gray day and went on to paralyze life for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states, with extensive evacuations that turned shorefront neighborhoods into ghost towns. Even the superintendent of the Statue of Liberty left to ride out the storm at his mother’s house in New Jersey; he said the statue itself was “high and dry,” but his house in the shadow of the torch was not.

The wind-driven rain lashed sea walls and protective barriers in places like Atlantic City, where the Boardwalk was damaged as water forced its way inland. Foam was spitting, and the sand gave in to the waves along the beach at Sandy Hook, N.J., at the entrance to New York Harbor. Water was thigh-high on the streets in Sea Bright, N.J., a three-mile sand-sliver of a town where the ocean joined the Shrewsbury River.

“It’s the worst I’ve seen,” said David Arnold, watching the storm from his longtime home in Long Branch, N.J. “The ocean is in the road, there are trees down everywhere. I’ve never seen it this bad.”

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office said late Monday night that at least five deaths in the state were attributable to the storm. At least three of those involved falling trees. About 7 p.m., a tree fell on a house in Queens, killing a 30-year-old man, the city police said. About the same time, two boys, ages 11 and 13, were killed in North Salem in Westchester County, when a tree fell on the house they were in, according to the State Police.

In Morris County, N.J., a man and a woman were killed when a tree fell on their car Monday evening, The Associated Press reported.

In Manhattan, NYU Langone Medical Center’s backup power system failed Monday evening, forcing the evacuation of patients to other facilities.

In a Queens beach community, nearly 200 firefighters were battling a huge blaze early on Tuesday morning that tore through more than 50 tightly-packed homes in an area where heavy flooding slowed responders.

Earlier, a construction crane atop one of the tallest buildings in the city came loose and dangled 80 stories over West 57th Street, across the street from Carnegie Hall.

Soon power was going out and water was rushing in. Waves topped the sea wall in the financial district in Manhattan, sending cars floating downstream. West Street, along the western edge of Lower Manhattan, looked like a river. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, known officially as the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel in memory of a former governor, flooded “from end to end,” the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said, hours after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York ordered it closed to traffic.Officials said water also seeped into seven subway tunnels under the East River.

Joseph J. Lhota, the transit authority chairman, called the storm the most devastating disaster in the 108-year history of the subway system.

“We could be fishing out our windows tomorrow,” said Garnett Wilcher, a barber who lives in the Hammells Houses, a block from the ocean in the Rockaways in Queens. Still, he said he felt safe at home. Pointing to neighboring apartment houses in the city-run housing project, he said, “We got these buildings for jetties.”

Hurricane-force winds extended up to 175 miles from the center of the storm; tropical-storm-force winds spread out 485 miles from the center. Forecasters said tropical-storm-force winds could stretch all the way north to Canada and all the way west to the Great Lakes. Snow was expected in some states.

Businesses and schools were closed; roads, bridges and tunnels were closed; and more than 13,000 airline flights were canceled. Even the Erie Canal was shut down.

Subways were shut down from Boston to Washington, as were Amtrak and the commuter rail lines. About 1,000 flights were canceled at each of the three major airports in the New York City area. Philadelphia International Airport had 1,200 canceled flights, according to FlightAware, a data provider in Houston. And late Monday night, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said cabs had been instructed to get off New York City roads.

A replica of the H.M.S. Bounty, a tall ship built for the 1962 movie “Mutiny on the Bounty” starring Marlon Brando and used in the recent “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, sank off the North Carolina coast. The Coast Guard said the 180-foot three-masted ship went down near the Outer Banks after being battered by 18-foot-high seas and thrashed by 40-m.p.h. winds. The body of one crew member, Claudene Christian, 42, was recovered. Another crew member remained missing.

Delaware banned cars and trucks from state roadways for other than “essential personnel.”

“The most important thing right now is for people to use common sense,” Gov. Jack Markell said. “We didn’t want people out on the road going to work and not being able to get home again.”

By early evening, the storm knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes, stores and office buildings. Consolidated Edison said that as of 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, 634,000 customers in New York City and Westchester County were without power. Con Edison, fearing damage to its electrical equipment, shut down power pre-emptively in sections of Lower Manhattan on Monday evening, and then, at 8:30 p.m., an unplanned failure, probably caused by flooding in substations, knocked out power to most of Manhattan below Midtown, about 250,000 customers. Later, an explosion at a Con Ed substation on East 14th Street knocked out power to another 250,000 customers.

In New Jersey, more than two million customers were without power as of 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, and in Connecticut nearly 500,000.

President Obama, who returned to the White House and met with top advisers, said Monday that the storm would disrupt the rhythms of daily life in the states it hit. “Transportation is going to be tied up for a long time,” he said, adding that besides flooding, there would probably be widespread power failures. He said utility companies had lined up crews to begin making repairs. But he cautioned that it could be slow going.

“The fact is, a lot of these emergency crews are not going to get into position to start restoring power until some of these winds die down,” the president said. He added, “That may take several days.”

Forecasters attributed the power of the storm to a convergence of weather systems. As the hurricane swirled north in the Atlantic and then pivoted toward land, a wintry storm was heading toward it from the west, and cold air was blowing south from the Arctic. The hurricane left more than 60 people dead in the Caribbean before it began crawling toward the Northeast.

“The days ahead are going to be very difficult, Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland said. “There will be people who die and are killed in this storm,” he said.

Alex Sosnowski, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather, said potentially damaging winds would continue on Tuesday from Illinois to the Carolinas — and as far north as Maine — as the storm barreled toward the eastern Great Lakes.

Mr. Cuomo, who ordered many of the most heavily used bridges and tunnels in New York City closed, warned that the surge from Hurricane Sandy could go two feet higher than that associated with Tropical Storm Irene last year. The PATH system, buses and the Staten Island Ferry system were also suspended.

Mr. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has said he expected to restore at least some service about 12 hours after the storm ended. But possible flooding within the subway system could prevent a full-scale reopening.

The storm headed toward land with weather that was episodic: a strong gust of wind one minute, then mist. More wind. Thin sheets of rain dancing down the street. Then, for a moment, nothing. The sky lightened. Then another blast of rain. Then more wind.

The day brought a giddiness to schoolchildren who had the day off and to grown-ups who were fascinated by the rough, rising water. Some went surfing, discounting the danger. Felquin Piedra, 38, rode his Jet Ski from Queens to Lower Manhattan.

“I love the waves,” Mr. Piedra yelled from New York Harbor. “The water is warm. I’ve jumped in several times.”

But even when landfall was still hours away, there was no holding back the advance guard of the storm — fast-moving bands of rain and punishing winds.

It added up to devastation. Driving through places like Pompton Plains, N.J., late Monday afternoon was like an X-Games contest for drivers. They had to do tree-limb slaloms on side streets and gunned their engines anxiously as they passed wind funnels of leaves swirling on highways.

On City Island, off the Bronx mainland, Cheryl Brinker sprayed “Sandy Stay Away” on her boarded-up art studio, expanding a collage she started during Tropical Storm Irene last year. But by midafternoon, nearby Ditmars Street was under as much as five feet of water and Steve Van Wickler said the water had cracked the cement in his cellar. “It’s like a little river running in my basement,” he said. “There are cracks and leaks everywhere.”

In some places, caravans of power-company trucks traveled largely empty roads; Public Service Electric and Gas said that 600 line workers and 526 tree workers had arrived from across the country, but could not start the repairs and cleanup until the wind had subsided, perhaps not until Wednesday.

They will see a landscape that, in many places, was remade by the storm. In Montauk, at the end of Long Island, a 50-seat restaurant broke in half. Half of the building floated away and broke into pieces on the beach.

The 110-foot-tall lighthouse at Montauk Point — the oldest in the state, opened in 1796 — shuddered in the storm despite walls that are six feet thick at the base. The lighthouse keeper, Marge Winski, said she had never felt anything like that in 26 years on the job.

“I went up in tower and it was vibrating, it was shaking,” she said. “I got out of it real quick. I’ve been here through hurricanes, and nor’easters, but nothing this bad.”

With at least 50 people dead, transit crippled in New York City and millions of people along the U.S. East Coast struggling without electricity, communities face a daunting challenge of repairing the damage wrought by superstorm Sandy.

In New York, where 18 people were killed, Mayor Michael Bloomberg surveyed the destruction in the hardest-hit neighbourhoods Tuesday. He said he saw homes so utterly destroyed only “chimneys and foundations” were left.

But despite the daunting challenge of recovery efforts, Bloomberg said “New Yorkers are resilient.”

• 350 Pictures: Sandy hits the U.S.

About a third of New York’s fleet of taxis were operating Tuesday, bus service was partially restored, and the New York Stock Exchange was expected to reopen Wednesday.

U.S. President Barack Obama declared New York and Long Island a “major” disaster area.

The declaration means federal funding is now available to residents of the hardest-hit areas, who awoke to a tragic aftermath of the deadly storm that slammed ashore in New Jersey on Monday evening.

New York had seen a four-metre surge of seawater crash ashore overnight, inundating the city’s tunnels and electrical systems and causing massive damage to the city’s famed subway. The storm left New York with no running trains, a vacated business district and entire neighbourhoods under water.

New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority said the subway system, which remains closed, had suffered the worst damage in its 108-year history.

As of midday Tuesday, Sandy’s sustained winds were already diminishing from the 130 km/h it was packing at landfall near Atlantic City, N.J. on Monday evening.

But forecasters warn the storm system will continue to affect a region stretching from the U.S. eastern seaboard north to Canada, and as far west as Wisconsin and Illinois, as it churns across Pennsylvania before veering into western New York state sometime Wednesday.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie gave a bleak update at a morning news conference Tuesday, saying seaside rail lines were washed away, and there was no safe place on the state’s barrier islands for him as large parts of the coast are still under water.

“We are in the midst of urban search and rescue. Our teams are moving as fast as they can,” Christie said. “The devastation on the Jersey Shore is some of the worst we’ve ever seen. The cost of the storm is incalculable at this point.”

The effects aren’t contained to America’s largest city. More than 7.4 million homes and businesses in an area that stretches from the Carolinas in the south to Ohio in the northeast are without power Tuesday. Tens of thousands were also without electricity in southern parts of Ontario and Quebec too, as Sandy carries its combination of rain and wind northwards.

In Canada, a Toronto woman was killed Monday evening after she was struck by a falling sign blown down in the powerful storm’s high winds.

Most of the Sandy-related wind warnings issued by Environment Canada have been called off however, except for the Sarnia region, areas along the St. Lawrence River in Quebec and Inverness County in Nova Scotia.

The storm was officially downgraded from hurricane status, but it came ashore packing a lot of energy due to its unusually low barometric pressure. Combined with a cold-weather system from the north, and the high tide of the full moon, the storm is forecast to continue wreaking havoc across a 1,300-kilometre region that’s home to 50 million people through Wednesday.

Forecasters are even warning as much as one metre of snow could fall in some states, some of which has already fallen in West Virginia and other higher ground inland.

Notable effects of post-tropical storm Sandy:

• U.S. death toll so far is 50, including 18 people in New York, and numerous others killed in a total of seven states.
• In Canada, one woman is dead after she was struck by debris from a wind-blown sign in the west-end of Toronto Monday evening.
• Sandy had already been blamed for 69 deaths when it tore through the Caribbean.
• Concerns during the peak of the storm prompted shutdowns at two nuclear plants in New York and New Jersey, as well as an alert at America’s oldest nuclear plant at Barneget Bay, N.J.
• 200 patients, including those on respirators and babies in intensive care, evacuated after New York University’s Tisch Hospital lost power.
• Winds toppled a construction crane atop a 74-storey luxury high-rise in midtown Manhattan, forcing the evacuation of nearby buildings.
• Fire destroyed at least 50 homes in the Breezy Point section of Queens.
• Four unoccupied row houses in Baltimore collapsed in the storm.
• Wind gusts of more than 100 km/h prompted the closure of the port in Portland, Maine.
• Flooding in areas from Virginia to Atlantic City, where the storm washed away a 15-metre section of the famous boardwalk. New York City’s now-flooded subway remains shut.
• The Holland Tunnel connecting New York to New Jersey is closed, as is a tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Brooklyn Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is also barricaded due to high winds.
• More than 12,000 commercial flights are cancelled, with more expected. New York’s LaGuardia, Newark Liberty and Kennedy airports are all closed.
• One crew member of the Canadian-built HMS Bounty sunk in storm-battered seas off North Carolina was found and later pronounced dead. 14 others rescued alive, but the captain is still missing.

An estimated 360,000 residents of 30 Connecticut communities were under mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders.

While it could take days to determine the extent of the storm damage, early estimates peg the potential price tag anywhere between $10 billion and $20 billion, which could make it one of the costliest storms in U.S. history.

Ahead of Sandy making landfall Monday, U.S. President Barack Obama declared states of emergency in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

“Please listen to what your state and local officials are saying,” Obama said from the White House. “When they tell you to evacuate, you need to evacuate. Don’t delay, don’t pause, don’t question the instructions that are being given, because this is a powerful storm.”

On the U.S. presidential election front, both Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney suspended campaigning Monday, with just a week left before voting day.

Storm makes landfall near Mamallapuram; rain claims four lives in Tamil Nadu

Albacore tuna show traces of radioactive cesium

LONGVIEW, Wash. (AP) — Oregon State University researchers have found traces of radioactive cesium from last year’s Japanese nuclear reactor disaster in West Coast albacore tuna.

The amount is far too small to harm people who eat the fish, the scientists said.

Scientists from the university and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration collected and tested fish caught off the West Coast before and after the March 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami that caused a nuclear reactor to release radioactive material, the Longview Daily News (http://bit.ly/QIcdV8) reported.

The team’s findings are in line with work by researchers in California, who announced in May that they had found traces of radioactive cesium in bluefin tuna caught off the southern coast.

“We’re still processing new fish, but so far the radiation we’re detecting is far below the level of concern for human safety,” said Delvan Neville, a graduate researcher with OSU’s Radiation Health Physics program and a co-investigator on the project.

Albacore tuna is a $41 million business in the Pacific Northwest, and fishermen from the region caught about 10,000 tons last year, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Washington fishermen accounted for about 53 percent of the haul, and the remainder came through Oregon docks.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Food and Drug Administration and NOAA have jointly stated they have “high confidence” in the safety of U.S. seafood products because the radiation levels are so low.

The OSU team said its findings could reveal information about where Pacific albacore tuna travel and how the ocean’s ecosystem can be linked to events thousands of miles away.

___

Information from: The Daily News, http://www.tdn.com

by Thomson Reuters

Oct 26 (Reuters) - U.S. electric companies from Maine to
Florida are preparing for heavy wind, rain and flooding that
could take down power lines and could close some East Coast
nuclear plants early next week when Hurricane Sandy comes
ashore.
    There are more than a dozen nuclear plants near Hurricane
Sandy's path in North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, New York and Connecticut, providing power to
millions of customers in the region. 
    The following lists the nuclear reactors and utilities in
Sandy's potential path.

 Plant                 State              Size    Company
                                          (MW)    

 Brunswick             North Carolina     1,858   Duke 

 Surry                 Virginia           1,638   Dominion

 North Anna            Virginia           1,863   Dominion

 Calvert Cliffs        Maryland           1,705   Constellation

 Salem                 New Jersey         2,332   PSEG

 Hope Creek            New Jersey         1,161   PSEG

 Peach Bottom          Pennsylvania       2,244   Exelon

 Limerick              Pennsylvania       2,264   Exelon

 Three Mile Island     Pennsylvania        805    Exelon

 Susquehanna           Pennsylavnia       2,450   PPL

 Oyster Creek          New Jersey          615    Exelon

 Indian Point          New York           2,063   Entergy

 Millstone             Connecticut        2,102   Dominion

 Pilgrim               Massachusetts       685    Entergy

 Seabrook              New Hampshire      1,247   NextEra

 Vermont Yankee        Vermont             620    Entergy

 (Reporting By Scott DiSavino; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)

 By Christine Harvey

Nuclear reactors in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast are being monitored for potential impacts by Hurricane Sandy, a Category 1 storm that may strike anywhere from Delaware to southern New England.

“Because of the size of it, we could see an impact to coastal and inland plants,” Neil Sheehan, a spokesman based in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said by phone. “We will station inspectors at the sites if we know they could be directly impacted.”

Enlarge image

Men walk amid the destruction caused by hurricane Sandy east of Havana in Mayari, Cuba. Source: AFP/Getty Images

The NRC met earlier today to discuss the necessary precautions to take for the storm, Sheehan said. Plants must begin to shut if wind speeds exceed certain limits, he said.

As of 2 p.m. New York time, Sandy had winds of 75 miles (121 kilometers) per hour, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami. It was about 430 miles south-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, moving north at 7 mph.

The current Hurricane Center track calls for the system to come ashore just south of Delaware Bay on Oct. 30.

Contingency Plans

Nuclear plants in the projected path of the hurricane include North Anna and Surry in Virginia, Calvert Cliffs in Maryland, Hope Creek and Salem in New Jersey, Indian Point in New York and Millstone in Connecticut. The NRC is considering enhancing inspector coverage of these reactors, Sheehan said in an e-mail today.

Public Service Enterprise Group Inc. (PEG) must shut all units at the Salem and Hope Creek plants two hours before the onset of hurricane-force winds greater than 74 mph, according to Sheehan. An “unusual event” would be declared if the winds are sustained for greater than 15 minutes or if the water level reaches 99.5 feet or higher, he said. Such an event is the lowest of four level of emergency used by the commission.

Salem Unit 2 is currently shut for refueling, while Unit 1 was operating at 83 percent of capacity today during maintenance on the circulating water system. Hope Creek ran at full power. The three units have a combined capacity of 3,365 megawatts.

“We are in phase one of our severe-weather plan,” Joe Delmar, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail responding to questions. “This includes inspecting, removing and securing outside areas for potential missiles, objects that could go airborne, and staging of emergency equipment and supplies.”

Millstone Reactor

Nuclear generation in the Northeastern region dropped 1.1 percent to 18,016 megawatts, with seven plants shut, an NRC report today showed.

Dominion Resources Inc.’s Millstone plant is monitoring Sandy’s progress and preparing to adjust staff as it comes closer, according to Ken Holt, a plant spokesman based in Richmond, Virginia. The plant must shut if winds reach 90 mph.

“We would shut down in advance of the storm if they were expected to be 90 miles per hour at the site,” Holt said by phone today. “Floods and high winds are a threat because they can knock off off-site power and we’d then need to activate emergency generators for power to put the plant to safe conditions.”

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State of Minnesota, Red Wing [Prairie Island Nuclear Power Plant]

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