MONTPELIER, Vt. — The full measure of Hurricane Irene’s fury came into focus Monday as the death toll jumped to 40, New England towns battled epic floods and millions faced the dispiriting prospect of several days without electricity.
From North Carolina to Maine, communities cleaned up and took stock of the uneven and hard-to-predict costs of a storm that spared the nation’s biggest city a nightmare scenario, only to deliver a historic wallop to towns well inland.
In New York City, where residents had braced for a disaster-movie scene of water swirling around skyscrapers, the subways and buses were up and running again in time for the Monday- morning commute. And to the surprise of many New Yorkers, things went pretty smoothly.
But in New England, landlocked Vermont contended with what its governor called the worst flooding in a century. Streams also raged out of control in upstate New York.
In many cases, the moment of maximum danger arrived well after the storm had passed, as rainwater made its way into rivers and streams and turned them into torrents. Irene dumped up to 11 inches of rain on Vermont and more than 13 in parts of New York.
“We were expecting heavy rains,” said Bobbi-Jean Jeun of Clarksville, N.Y., a hamlet near Albany. “We were expecting flooding. We weren’t expecting devastation.”
Meanwhile, the death toll, which had stood at 21 as of Sunday night, rose sharply as bodies were pulled from floodwaters and people were electrocuted by downed power lines.
The tally of Irene’s destruction mounted too. A home exploded in an evacuated, flooded area in Pompton Lakes, N.J., early Monday, and firefighters had to battle the flames from a boat. In the Albany suburb of Guilderland, police rescued two people whose car was swept away a few hours earlier. The two were found clinging to trees along the swollen creek.
“It’s going to take time to recover from a storm of this magnitude,” President Barack Obama said as he promised that the government would do everything in its power to help people get back on their feet.
For many, the aftermath could prove more painful than the storm itself.
In North Carolina, where Irene blew ashore along the Outer Banks on Saturday before heading for New York and New England, 1,000 people were still in emergency shelters, awaiting word on their homes.
At the same time, nearly 5 million homes and businesses in a dozen states were still without electricity, and utilities warned it might be a week or more before some people got their power back.
Up and down the Eastern Seaboard, commuters and vacationers found their travel plans scrambled. Airlines warned it could be days before the thousands of passengers stranded by Irene find their way home. Some Amtrak service in the Northeast was suspended. Commuter trains between New Jersey and New York City were not running. Trains between the city and its northern suburbs also were disrupted.
Kris and Jennifer Sylvester of Brooklyn sat on a bench in the town center in Woodstock, N.Y., with luggage at their feet and their daughters, ages 4 and 9, holding signs reading, “Need a Ride 2 NYC” and “Help Us, No Bus, No Train.” They had ridden Amtrak out for a long weekend in the country and were unable to get home.
In Vermont, the state’s emergency- management headquarters stood empty, evacuated because of river flooding from Irene’s heavy rains. Rescuers used a boat and bucket loaders to pluck seven people from a swamped mobile-home park in Lyndonville.
Throughout the region, hundreds of roads were impassable because of flooding or fallen trees, and some bridges had simply given way, including a 156-year-old hand-hewn wooden covered bridge across Schoharie Creek in Blenheim, N.Y. In all, more than a dozen towns in Vermont and at least three in New York remained cut off by flooded roads and bridges.
Still, there were glimmers of good news. In Pennsylvania, the Delaware River largely remained in its banks, cresting several feet lower than feared. The forecast for flooding on the Mohawk River in New York also eased at Schenectady, N.Y., where officials had worried that high water might threaten the city’s drinking water and sewage-treatment plant.
