The damages caused by the infamous Hurricane rampage may go up from $7 to $13 billion according to statistical estimates. The hurricane had ravaged across 10 states leading to tremendous amount of flooding and winds, leaving six million homes and businesses without power.
From the dawn on Monday, thousands of people came to the streets to clear up the wreckage that had been caused by rising waters. One of the government authorities in charging of the clearing up the uprooted trees and submerged power lines said that the process could take more than three weeks. There is still threat looming about an unpredictable, yet imminent flooding that may cause problem to the nation’s infrastructure.
There are many opinions about the estimated cost that will be borne in rebuilding the infrastructure. At this point in time, the Consumer Federation of America cited that they estimated more than $5 billion in personal insurance claims from wind damage and another $2 billion for flood damage. The total cost of the loss can be higher than $7 billion because there has been sheer economic loss due to shut businesses, paralyzed transportation and goods that have been sitting at one place without any distribution mechanism. A video posted on Facebook showed how a 141 year old bridge in Rockingham crumbled and was swept away by the raging Williams River.
There have been cases of 25 reported deaths across the states that were affected. Most deaths were reported in the areas of Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, and Pennsylvania due to trees crashing into homes and cars. There was a case of one woman drowning in New Jersey after her car came under flood attack. In New York and Connecticut, two people died due to fire attack caused by drowned wires.
Though train serves to New Jersey and Long Island have been restored to some extent, the train service in the northern suburbs may open in some time soon. Thousands of passengers were stranded as the flights were cancelled over the weekend.
Airports in New York and around the Northeast were reopening to a backlog of hundreds of thousands of passengers whose flights were cancelled over the weekend. Irene, a major hurricane with winds swifter than 110 miles per hour was downgraded to a tropical storm with a speed of 65 miles per hour when it reached New York. It weakened and the speed came down to 50 miles per hour, when it reached Canada.
The disaster assessment firm, Kinetic Analysis Corp, first estimated the total damages to be $20 billion but then downgraded their assessment when they saw that the hurricane had begun to progressively weaken. The most expensive hurricane in the history of US has been Katrina in 2005 which caused tremendous damage to New Orleans and the losses amount to a whopping $100 billion.
