Flooded streets. Houses ripped to their foundations. Trees down across main streets – and that is just in Fairfield.
The devastation felt from Hurricane Sandy stretches far beyond North Benson Road, Fairfield University and Connecticut as a whole.
It has been reported that at least 17 states felt the effects of the hurricane as it wreaked havoc across the east coast of the United States. The hardest hit state was New Jersey, where Sandy made its landfall.
According to “NBC News” yesterday, hundreds of thousands of people could be out of power in New York City, Long Island and New Jersey for the next 10 days. It is also estimated that New Jersey alone had $30 billion worth of damage, as the shoreline has been swept away by the storm.
In an article from The Associated Press, in which they followed residents from New Jersey as they headed back to their houses, the reactions from the inhabitants illuminated the general feeling of Jersey residents.
“It’s just sadness. It looks like a bomb went off here. There’s almost nobody here; it looks like tumbleweeds are rolling down the street,” New Jersey resident Barbara Montemarano said to The Associated Press.
Fellow New Jersey native Dennis Cucci also said: “We’re running out of clean clothes. This is the last pair of dry shoes I have. It took the storm two days to wreck all this, and it’s going to take well over a year to recover from it.”
The Jersey Shore, and most specifically Bergen Point, experienced the largest storm surge at 14.6 feet. It was exactly waves like that which caused such devastation to the coastline.
The storm hit the shore on Sunday night into Monday and worked its way up to Connecticut by late Monday afternoon. Aside from New Jersey, New York City and especially Manhattan were hit hard by the hurricane.
What followed the wind and rain added more to the crazy weather phenomenon that was already being called “Frankenstorm.” Hurricane Sandy started to produce snow at the tail end of the storm, and it wasn’t just trace amounts. In Tennessee, snow added up to 34 inches.
Extreme weather has been less than extraordinary in recent years, but this past week has been a bit crazier than most would expect. On Sunday, Oct. 28, when Hurricane Sandy was threatening the east coast, a 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit the west coast of Canada. The earthquake caused a tsunami warning in Hawaii, where waves peaked at five feet in the first 45 minutes of the warning.
People across the country are wondering if these extreme weather events are signs of global warming.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo spoke out saying: “There’s only so long you can say, ‘this is once in a lifetime and it’s not going to happen again.’”
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