East Coast, Natural Disaster | featured news

Across the Midwest and up and down the East Coast, millions of people are living without power. And they are not happy about it. More than 900,000 households remain without power early Wednesday in Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio, the states hardest hit by the storm Friday night that packed 80-mph winds.

Nearly 100,000 people were ordered to flee the rising Susquehanna River on Thursday as the remnants of Tropical Storm Lee dumped more rain across the Northeast, socking areas still recovering from Hurricane Irene and closing major highways at the morning rush. At Binghamton, N.Y., the wide river broke a flood record and flowed over retaining walls downtown. Interstate 88 was closed and emergency responders scrambled to evacuate holdouts who didn’t heed warnings to leave neighborhoods.

The price in disaster relief will further balloon a government account that already is a source of partisan friction between President Obama and Congress.

The big, ugly hunk of weather known as Lee weakened as it moved across Louisiana on Monday morning, and is no longer classified as a tropical storm -- though experts warn it could still cause flooding as it moves up the East Coast.

Tropical Storm Irene destroyed roads and marooned residents in more than a dozen central and southern Vermont towns in a matter of hours. The disaster took four days to unfold on Camels Hump Road, just east of Chittenden County.

The Washington area began to return to normal Monday after a lashing by the former hurricane Irene, but hundreds of thousands of residents remained without power, and several local school systems were closed

Hurricane Irene knocked out power to nearly 1 million customers in Virginia; it was being restored in some areas today. Dominion Virginia Power said on its website early Sunday that more than 973,000 of its more than 2.4 million customers were without power Sunday morning.

Main stock exchanges Nasdaq, NYSE and BATS expect to open trading on Monday as usual despite Hurricane Irene, although a final decision, especially on opening the Big Board floor, is yet to come.

From North Carolina to Pennsylvania, Hurricane Irene appeared to have fallen short of the doomsday predictions. But with rivers still rising, and roads impassable because of high water and fallen trees, it could be days before the full extent of the damage is known. More than 4.5 million homes and businesses along the coast lost power, and at least 14 deaths were blamed on the storm.

Airlines are scrapping more than 9,000 flights this weekend from North Carolina to Boston.