Neither President Barack Obama nor his rival Mitt Romney seem to have a definite action plan for this one. Hurricane Sandy, the monster storm bearing down on the East Coast, strengthened on Monday after hundreds of thousands moved to higher ground, public transport shut down and the stock market suffered its first weather-related closure in 27 years. About 50 million people from the Mid-Atlantic to Canada were in the path of the nearly 1,000-mile-wide (1,600-km-wide) storm, which forecasters said could be the largest to hit the mainland in US history.
The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Monday that the Category 1 storm had strengthened as it turned toward the coast and was moving at 15 mph. It was expected to bring a ‘life-threatening storm surge’, coastal hurricane winds and heavy snow in the Appalachian Mountains, the NHC said. Nine US states have declared states of emergency and President Barack Obama has warned the nation to brace itself. ‘This is a serious and big storm,’ Obama said. ‘We don’t yet know where it’s going to hit, where we’re going to see the biggest impacts.
Sandy forced President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney to cancel some campaign stops and fueled concern it could disrupt early voting before the November 6 election. The United Nations, Broadway theaters, New Jersey casinos, schools up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and myriad corporate events were also being shut down.
Transportation systems shut down in anticipation. Airlines canceled flights, bridges and tunnels closed, and national passenger rail operator Amtrak suspended nearly all service on the East Coast. The U.S. government told non-emergency workers in Washington DC to stay home. Utilities from the Carolinas to Maine reported late Sunday that a combined 14,000 customers were already without power.
Cuba has postponed a nationwide military drill after the destructive Hurricane Sandy caused 11 deaths and millions of dollars in damage in the island country, state-run daily Juventud Rebelde said on Sunday.
The Bastion 2012 Strategic Exercise, the largest national military drill in the past three years, would be rescheduled from late November to sometime in the first half of 2013, Cuban leader Raul Castro said at an emergency session of the Council of Ministers.
Castro said what was needed now was to ‘make a detailed plan for the recovery of the regions (affected by the hurricane) and make a collection of all the resources they may need’, reported Xinhua.
He called on his officials to ‘make every effort to restore the affected areas to normalcy as quickly as possible’.
This was not the first time that Cuba postponed military exercises after being hit by hurricanes. It had postponed the last large-scale national army drill from November 2008 to November 2009 due to three devastating hurricanes.
Officials said preliminary figures showed the late-season Sandy hurricane has killed 11 people and caused more than $2 billion in losses in Cuba, becoming the second most devastating cyclone to hit the island country in the past 50 years after Dennis claimed 16 lives in July 2005.
Sandy has destroyed substantial rural tourism infrastructure along the state’s coast and mountainous regions, including hotels, mountaintop campsites and cabins, authorities said on Sunday. Tourism, Cuba’s second-biggest foreign currency earner, draws nearly 3 million international travellers annually.
On Sunday, Castro toured some hurricane-affected areas in Cuba, including the central provinces of Villa Clara and Sancti Spiritus, local media said.
‘We are going to do our utmost in every sense... we are going to organize a collection of everything we can, of all types of resources,’ he said, referring to government aid to the worst-hit areas.
The US National Hurricane Center (NHC) said on Monday that the Category 1 storm had strengthened as it turned toward the coast and was moving at 15 mph. It was expected to bring a ‘life-threatening storm surge’, coastal hurricane winds and heavy snow in the Appalachian Mountains, the NHC said. Nine US states have declared states of emergency and President Barack Obama has warned the nation to brace itself. ‘This is a serious and big storm,’ Obama said. ‘We don’t yet know where it’s going to hit, where we’re going to see the biggest impacts.
Sandy forced President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney to cancel some campaign stops and fueled concern it could disrupt early voting before the November 6 election. The United Nations, Broadway theaters, New Jersey casinos, schools up and down the Eastern Seaboard, and myriad corporate events were also being shut down.
Transportation systems shut down in anticipation. Airlines canceled flights, bridges and tunnels closed, and national passenger rail operator Amtrak suspended nearly all service on the East Coast. The U.S. government told non-emergency workers in Washington DC to stay home. Utilities from the Carolinas to Maine reported late Sunday that a combined 14,000 customers were already without power.
Cuba has postponed a nationwide military drill after the destructive Hurricane Sandy caused 11 deaths and millions of dollars in damage in the island country, state-run daily Juventud Rebelde said on Sunday.
The Bastion 2012 Strategic Exercise, the largest national military drill in the past three years, would be rescheduled from late November to sometime in the first half of 2013, Cuban leader Raul Castro said at an emergency session of the Council of Ministers.
Castro said what was needed now was to ‘make a detailed plan for the recovery of the regions (affected by the hurricane) and make a collection of all the resources they may need’, reported Xinhua.
He called on his officials to ‘make every effort to restore the affected areas to normalcy as quickly as possible’.
This was not the first time that Cuba postponed military exercises after being hit by hurricanes. It had postponed the last large-scale national army drill from November 2008 to November 2009 due to three devastating hurricanes.
Officials said preliminary figures showed the late-season Sandy hurricane has killed 11 people and caused more than $2 billion in losses in Cuba, becoming the second most devastating cyclone to hit the island country in the past 50 years after Dennis claimed 16 lives in July 2005.
Sandy has destroyed substantial rural tourism infrastructure along the state’s coast and mountainous regions, including hotels, mountaintop campsites and cabins, authorities said on Sunday. Tourism, Cuba’s second-biggest foreign currency earner, draws nearly 3 million international travellers annually.
On Sunday, Castro toured some hurricane-affected areas in Cuba, including the central provinces of Villa Clara and Sancti Spiritus, local media said.
‘We are going to do our utmost in every sense... we are going to organize a collection of everything we can, of all types of resources,’ he said, referring to government aid to the worst-hit areas.