Delaware Valley and Jersey Shore Areas Recovering From Spring Nor'easter

 
KYW Newsradio Team Coverage 

Atlantic and Cape May counties in New Jersey were hit hard by Monday's nor'easter.

KYW’s David Madden reports from one of the harder hit areas -- Sea Isle City, NJ -- where they normally brace for Mother Nature’s fury in March, not May. 

Now, businesses along the boardwalk and nearby Landis Avenue have little more than a week to prepare for the start of the busy summer tourist season. 

Antonio Galdi owns two pizza shops -- one in Sea Isle, the other in Avalon. He says that in Avalon they pulled the pumps out:

"We had four inches on the first tide, six inches on the second tide."
 
What about his shop in Sea Isle?

"Here we had just a lot of outside damage."
 
Ditto for a surf shop just up the block. But some Vineland High School seniors, including Lindsay Long, are now facing significant damage to their automobiles:
 
"The electricity doesn’t work. You can’t unlock it. I can’t even get the door open. I just got this car two days ago."

Her prom is on Thursday night. Now, she may have to ask her parents to take her.

KYW's Michelle Durham reports that Atlantic Electric was reporting a significant jump in power outages about 8:30am Tuesday morning. The Atlantic Electric outage map was red in Atlantic County, which means the area had anywhere from 2,500 to 55,000 customers without power.  

At 6:30am, Cape May County had about 3,700 customers still in the dark.

Michael Schurman, Atlantic County's director of highway safety and community affairs, say numerous bridges along with the White Horse and Black Horse Pikes were closed due to flooding:

"This was the worst storm that we had all year -- there's no question about it. It's very unusual to have a storm of this intensity this late in the year."

Early on Tuesday morning, some Ocean City, NJ officials were saying that if this storm had to happen, it was better that it happened on Monday than later on in the week. A multi-million beach replenishment project is supposed to start on Thursday in Ocean City. Jim Rutala is Ocean City's business administrator:

"Sometimes beach replacement projects happen in the fall. If that (had happened), then six million dollars worth of sand may have gotten washed away as a result of this storm."

Some businesses face a long cleanup. Jim Kardas owns Horizon Suites in North Wildwood:

"This is the worst damage I've had to the hotel. I looked inside the rooms -- there was no damage inside the rooms. So hopefully we can get everything patched up enough to open up."

Meanwhile, the number of outages in Gloucester Township, especially the Glassboro area, had dropped by 8:30am to about 500 from 1,200.

Peco Energy was also reporting about 500 customers without power, mostly in Delaware and Chester counties. Outages in Bucks and Montgomery counties were limited on Tuesday morning.

Wind gusts in some shore areas were over 76 miles an hour -- that's higher than hurricane strength. Trees and power lines tumbled down, leaving thousands across the region without power.

KYW AccuWeather says the heaviest of the rain passed just south of the Philadelphia region, with Baltimore seeing as much rain in one day as they typically see in an entire month.

KYW's Ian Bush reported on Monday afternoon that a spring Nor'easter was causing plenty of weather problems in the Delaware Valley and along the Jersey shore, from downed trees and power outages to flooding and flight delays.

At noon on Monday, the power was off in about 24,000 homes and businesses served by Peco. Those outages were concentrated in Philadelphia's suburban counties.

At the same time, Atlantic City Electric had more than 45,000 customers without power throughout their coverage area.

The utilities say downed trees and tree limbs are to blame for most of the issues, and high winds were a problem as crews worked to get the electricity back on.

However, high waters and beach erosion already are a problem along the Jersey shore. Ocean City and Wildwood have been hit hard with street flooding (right). 

Frank McCall is director of Cape May County emergency communications center:

"The barrier island communities are experiencing flooding. There's a lot of wind damage on the barrier Island communities and the mainland because of the winds."

Wildwood, NJ was put under a state of emergency starting at 4am Monday, and all schools in the community were closed.

At Philadelphia International Airport, flights were delayed an average of three hours on arrivals. Many departures also were behind schedule, with a good number canceled.