Natural Disaster | featured news

GeoEye images show a section of beach in Seaside Heights, New Jersey before Hurricane Sandy, and the damage after.

The Pentagon is airlifting power restoration experts and trucks cross-country, from California to New York, to bolster efforts to assist the millions of people still living in darkness days after superstorm Sandy hit the U.S. Northeast.

After the storm comes the rebuilding, and the scammers capitalizing on fear and need. With $20 billion estimated in property damage, demand for clean-up and repair is high, putting anxious homeowners at risk for hard-sell fly-by-night contractors.

New York tried to resume its normal frenetic pace Thursday, getting back much of its vital subway system after a crippling storm, but was l slowed by gridlocked traffic....

Flights resumed, but slowly. The New York Stock Exchange got back to business, but on generator power. And with the subways still down, great numbers of people walked across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan in a reverse of the exodus of 9/11....

People in the heavily populated U.S. East Coast corridor battered by superstorm Sandy took the first cautious steps to reclaim their upended daily routines... Two major airports reopened and the New York Stock Exchange got back to business Wednesday, while across the river in New Jersey, National Guardsmen rushed to feed and rescue flood victims two days after Superstorm Sandy struck.

The U.S. federal agency in charge of disaster relief, under intense pressure to show the Obama administration can quickly respond to the devastation caused by the massive storm Sandy, said it has plenty of cash to deliver timely aid to the millions of people struggling to recover.

A day after it launched a punishing strike on the East Coast of the United States, Superstorm Sandy remained a threat Tuesday. The storm made landfall along the coast of southern New Jersey on Monday night, but its mammoth size affected a much wider area -- and continued to do so as it shuffled northward toward Canada, leaving at least 30 U.S. deaths in its wake.

Superstorm Sandy will end up causing about $20 billion in property damages and $10 billion to $30 billion more in lost business, according to IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm....

Electrons work for free, except, of course in major storms -- as several prominent websites discovered... Lost sites beginning [Monday] night included the Huffington Post, Gawker and the blog Mediaite. Huffington Post was back by Tuesday morning, but the site was a bit skimpier. According to a statement posted on a website of the more traditional kind, CBS News, the problem seemed to be flooding.