SCRANTON, Pa. — Flooded highways, downed power lines and rising rivers greeted people Tuesday morning from Tennessee to Maine, with a blizzard warning and as much as 3 feet of snow expected to fall in West Virginia after the remnants of Hurricane Sandy rumbled through and a cold front from the north continued to push east.
The storm, though vastly weaker than it was when it made landfall in New Jersey on Monday night, was moving west Tuesday through southern Pennsylvania, spawning rain and high winds all the way to the Great Lakes, the National Weather Service reported. The system continued to pack winds of 65 mph.
Sandy killed at least 50 people, many hit by falling trees.
President Barack Obama signed major-disaster declarations for New York and New Jersey on Tuesday, authorizing the distribution of direct federal assistance to victims of Hurricane Sandy from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
More than 8.2 million households were without power in 17 states as far west as Michigan. Nearly 2 million of those were in New York, where large swaths of Lower Manhattan lost electricity and entire streets ended up under water — as did seven subway tunnels between Manhattan and Brooklyn at one point, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said.
The New York Stock Exchange was closed for a second day because of weather, the first time that has happened since a blizzard in 1888. It will reopen for regular trading today.
The city’s subway system, the lifeblood of more than 5 million residents, was damaged like never before and closed indefinitely, and Consolidated Edison said electricity in and around New York could take a week to restore.
In one bit of good news, officials announced that John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York and Newark International Airport in New Jersey will reopen this morning with limited service. New York’s LaGuardia Airport remains closed.
Parts of the West Virginia mountains were blanketed with 2 feet of snow by Tuesday afternoon, and drifts 4 feet deep were reported at Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. A blizzard warning was in effect for the mountains of West Virginia and southwestern Virginia.
Mount Davis, in southern Pennsylvania, had 9 inches of snow, the weather service said.
In Milford, Del., it was rain, not snow, causing trouble.
Areas of central Delaware had received more than 9 1/2 inches of rain by Tuesday morning, and a flood warning was in place along the Nanticoke River.
Brian McNoldy, a hurricane expert at the University of Miami, said in an online posting Tuesday that heavy rainfall from the storm also had caused the Potomac River to reach its highest level since 1996. Flooding was expected along the river in Maryland and Virginia, officials said.
Forecasters said Tuesday that they no longer expected the storm to turn to the northeast and travel across New England. Instead, the track has shifted well to the west, and prediction models suggest it was to move through central Pennsylvania and western New York state before entering southern Ontario by today, said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami.
As the storm continues to move inland and loses contact with the ocean — its source of moisture — rain levels are expected to diminish although wind damage is still likely across a large area of the country, Blake said.
“You’ve got rain or snow extending from Georgia through Maine and Michigan,” he said. “When you have something over Pennsylvania, and Lake Michigan is seeing gale-force winds, you’ve got a very large storm.”
Classes at public schools and universities had been canceled Tuesday as far north as Maine and Vermont, which is still coping from damage to roads and bridges from Hurricane Irene last year.
In New Hampshire, more than 200,000 homes had no power, and in Maine, where more than 100,000 people were without electricity, a flood warning was issued for the Swift River. Most flights out of Portland International Jetport had been canceled Tuesday morning.
Elsewhere in New England, there was heavy coastal flooding in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, where nearly 300,000 people had lost power.
In Pennsylvania, where the storm was causing damage Tuesday and two people died, Gov. Tom Corbett extended the deadline for voters to request absentee ballots from Tuesday to Thursday. But a deadline to return such ballots by mail had not been extended beyond Friday, despite disruptions in mail service, according to the governor’s office.
One million people in the state had no electricity — and in northeastern Pennsylvania, near the town of Hazelton, officials have asked residents living near Nescopeck Creek to evacuate.
Farther south, in North Carolina, Gov. Bev Perdue had declared one of the region’s numerous states of emergencies for several counties in the western part of the state because of heavy snowfall caused by moisture swept in by Hurricane Sandy.
The mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee are likely to get more than 18 inches of snow over the next several days, while southwestern Virginia and parts of Kentucky may get even more — up to 2 feet, according to the National Weather Service.
Those at lower elevations in the area were stuck with rain.
“It’s not pretty,” said Jim Rigsby, who was working the reservation desk at the Music Road Inn in Pigeon Forge, Tenn., “It’s just rain and yuck.”
Winds from the storm continued to be felt as far away as eastern Alabama, with some gusts topping 35 mph.
In Maryland, at least two people were killed in weatherrelated accidents, one in a car accident, the second after a tree fell on a house, officials said.
Highways and other roads throughout Virginia remained closed and the state has had at least two storm-related traffic accidents, said Marshall Barnhill, a spokesman for the state’s emergency-operations center.
But many areas that had feared calamity escaped with little disruption.
In Boston, public schools reopened Tuesday, and subway and bus service also resumed although Amtrak remained closed in the Northeast corridor. Many people seemed to be getting back to their routines, with families planning for Halloween trick-or-treating tonight.
Wind whipped through the streets of downtown Chicago early Tuesday morning, where a lakeshore flood warning will be in effect until today. The National Weather Service said winds would reach more than 50 mph by Tuesday evening, pushing waves as high as 23 feet along the city’s shoreline.
Chicago officials have warned residents to take precautions against the high winds and to avoid the lakefront.
The city sent automated phone calls to some residents in Chicago late Monday night, said Delores Robinson, a spokesman for the Chicago Office of Emergency Management, warning them not to take Lake Shore Drive to work in the morning, although the road remains open.
Sandy knocked out a quarter of the cell-phone towers in an area spreading across 10 states, and the situation could get worse, federal regulators said Tuesday.
Many cell towers that are still working are doing so with the help of generators and could run out of fuel before commercial power is restored, the Federal Communications Commission said.
The landline phone network has held up better in the affected area, which stretches from Virginia to Massachusetts, the FCC said, but about a quarter of cable customers also are without service.
The FCC did not have an estimate for the number of people in the affected area.
Also, three nuclear-power reactors were shut down because of electricity concerns during Sandy, while a fourth plant, Oyster Creek in New Jersey, remains in “alert” mode because of high water levels in its water intake structure, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said Tuesday.
All three reactors shut down safely, the commission said.
By Tuesday afternoon, there were still only hints of the economic impact of the storm.
Forecasting firm IHS Global Insight predicted the storm will end up causing about $20 billion in damage and $10 billion to $30 billion in lost business. Another firm, AIR Worldwide, estimated losses up to $15 billion — big numbers probably offset by reconstruction and repairs that will contribute to longer-term growth.
Major retailers began trying Tuesday to ramp up their operations before the critical Christmas shopping period.
At some point during the storm, 168 Wal-Mart stores were closed in 14 states, said Mark Cooper, the retailer’s senior director of global emergency management in Bentonville. Some had reopened Tuesday, but how many was unavailable at the time of a conference call with reporters, he said.
Sandy began in the Atlantic and knocked around the Caribbean — killing nearly 70 people — and strengthened into a hurricane as it chugged across the southeastern coast of the United States. By Tuesday night it had ebbed in strength but was joining up with another, more wintry storm — an expected confluence of weather systems that earned it nicknames such as “superstorm” and, as Halloween neared, “Frankenstorm.”
Information for this article was contributed by John Schwartz, Timothy Williams, Brian Stelter, Theo Emery, John H. Cushman Jr., Katharine Q. Seelye, Kim Severson, Steven Yaccino, Eric Lipton and Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times; by Ted Anthony, Katie Zezima, Alicia Caldwell, Martin Crutsinger, Colleen Long, Jennifer Peltz, Tom Hays, Larry Neumeister, Ralph Russo, Scott Mayerowitz, Meghan Barr, Christopher S. Rugaber, Marc Levy, John Christoffersen, Vicki Smith, David Porter, Joe Mandak, Dave Collins, Sandy Shore, Candice Choi, Anne D’Innocenzio, Matthew Craft, Bernard Condon, Bree Fowler, Mark Jewell, Peter Svensson, Erin McClam, Verena Dobnik, Frank Eltman, Karen Matthews, Alexandra Olson and Hal Ritter of The Associated Press; by Steven Mufson of The Washington Post; and by Steve Painter of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/31/2012