The images of Superstorm Sandy’s destruction have dominated the media this week, and with good reason.
After leaving some 69 people dead in the Caribbean, Sandy came up the Eastern Seaboard and made landfall Monday in New Jersey with 80-mph winds and a tremendous surge fueled by hurricane-force winds and a higher than normal full-moon high tide.
By then the storm — the largest to hit the United States in decades — had re-energized after merging with another system.
Sandy is blamed for 75 deaths in the United States (as of Thursday afternoon), with 30 in New York City and 12 in New Jersey. It is likely to rank as one of the costliest storms in U.S. history, according to government estimates. One disaster-modeling firm says Sandy may have caused as much as $15 billion in insured losses, Reuters reports.
About 6 million homes and businesses in 15 states remained without power Wednesday, down from a high of nearly 8.5 million, which surpassed the record 8.4 million customers who went dark from last year’s Hurricane Irene, according to Reuters.
A camera on the New York Times building in Manhattan rolled continuously from Sunday to Wednesday, documenting the ominous conditions in time-lapse video as the storm rolled over the Big Apple.
Click play for the Times video.
A time-lapse video also was captured by a NASA GOES satellite. The images, taken from Oct. 21 through Oct. 30, show the storm’s birth in the Caribbean, its intensification in the Atlantic and its landfall in southern New Jersey and inland path through Pennsylvania.
The video offers some perspective of the storm’s reach. At one point, there were tropical-storm force winds over an area of nearly 1,000 miles.
