East Coast, Natural Disaster | featured news

A vast storm system that spawned tornadoes and killed three people marched toward the East Coast on Friday, delivering spring snow and ice to New England and promising to drench some of the country’s most populous cities. On Thursday, storms tore through the Great Plains, Midwest and South.

Residents in New York and New Jersey on Wednesday braced for the arrival of a nor’easter expected to pelt the region with more rain, high winds and coastal flooding even as the Superstorm Sandy recovery is underway.

A small earthquake hit northern New Jersey early Monday morning, the U.S. Geological Survey reported. The magnitude 2.0 temblor struck at 1:19 a.m. and was centered in Ringwood, N.J., a community that’s still reeling from downed trees and power outages caused by Superstorm Sandy.

The effort to reopen schools shut by Hurricane Sandy presented officials with a tangled puzzle and New York City’s 1.1 million students with a drastically altered landscape... Cots lined the hallways, and toilets were limited or clogged, so some evacuees went to the bathroom on the floor. Volunteers, gagging at air made more fetid by unwashed bodies, took to wearing masks. “We gave them wipes,” a volunteer said, “but there’s only so much you can do with wipes.”

Commuters into New York City endured long waits and crowded trains, giving the recovering commuter system a stress test a week after Superstorm Sandy ravaged the New Jersey and New York coast lines....

Tens of thousands of people in New York state whose homes were damaged by storm Sandy could soon need housing as cold weather arrives, politicians warn.

With only sporadic access to text messaging and the Web, many in Hurricane Sandy's no-power zone quickly cobbled together systems for passing along information and arranging when and where to meet.

A mother learns that her newborn is part of a hospital evacuation. Facebook posts from a member of the HMS Bounty turn ominous. A man worries about the wind and rain, but another force of nature hits home.

The massive storm that started out as Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast and morphed into a huge and problematic system, killing at least 94 people in the United States. Power outages now stand at more than 3.6 million homes and businesses, down from a peak of 8.5 million. Here's a snapshot of what is happening, state by state....

Following Hurricane Katrina seven years ago, FEMA became a national punching bag, ridiculed for its slow and cumbersome response to the disaster along the Gulf Coast. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy this week, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and its administrator W. Craig Fugate are garnering more positive reviews from public officials in northeastern states hit by the superstorm, as well as from disaster-management experts.