MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Hundreds of thousands remain without electricity in north east US and Quebec

Commuter lines and Amtrak still disrupted due to flooded tracks or blocked with debris

The cleanup after tropical storm Irene continued Tuesday across the Canadian province of Quebec, where the storm washed out roads, downed power lines and possibly contributed to one death. An 81-year old man died after he disappeared for several hours during the storm northeast of Montreal.

Quebec provincial police are still searching for the body of a taxi driver whose car was swept into the Yamaska River on Monday.

Hydro-Québec said 16,000 clients were still without power Tuesday afternoon, down from 250,000 outages during the storm's peak on Sunday. Most of those affected are in the Montérégie and Quebec City areas.

Further south the states of New Jersey and Vermont struggled on Tuesday with their worst flooding in decades a day after Hurricane Irene slammed an already soaked US Northeast with torrential rain, dragging away homes and submerging neighbourhoods underwater.

The massive storm churned up the US. East Coast over the weekend killing at least 41 people in 11 states, in addition to three who died in the Dominican Republic and one in Puerto Rico when the storm was still in the Caribbean, authorities said.

Spared from Irene's worst fury, New York City went back to work yesterday despite a partially crippled mass transit system and power outages that left 100,000 customers in the metropolitan area and nearly one million in the state without electricity.

Overall, some 5.1 million homes and businesses were still without power from North Carolina to Maine, and utilities said it could take days to restore electricity in more accessible areas and weeks in the hardest-hit regions.

Hundreds of thousands of people in New Jersey could be without electricity, water supplies or gas for days to come, their comfortable towns strewn with felled trees and branches blocking main roadways.

“It's going to take time to recover from a storm of this magnitude,” President Barack Obama told reporters in Washington. “The effects are still being felt across much of the country, including in New England and states like Vermont where there's been an enormous amount of flooding.

”I'm going to make sure that FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and other agencies are doing everything in their power to help people on the ground.”

Vermont officials called it the state's worst flooding since 1927. Air travel at New York City's three major area airports slowly resumed service, and financial markets operated normally, although volumes were low. More than 12,000 East Coast flights were cancelled and it could take three days to restore normal service, the industry group Air Transport Association said.

New York City subways returned to service, but many commuter lines to the city and national train carrier Amtrak were disrupted due to tracks that were flooded or blocked with fallen trees and debris. While Irene failed to produce the devastation many had expected when New York City pre-emptively ordered unprecedented evacuations and a shutdown of its mass transit system on Saturday, it still left hundreds of thousands of homeowners with flood damage, especially in New Jersey and Vermont.

Some 5 to 15 inches of rain fell over a 24- to 36-hour period in north-eastern states, said David Vallee, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service, creating moderate to major flooding in parts of eastern New York State, the Connecticut River valley and much of northern New Hampshire and Vermont.

And further south the US Hurricane Centre in Miami reported that tropical Storm Katia is expected to become a hurricane by late Wednesday or early Thursday. The storm was moving at west-northwest at 29 kilometers and was expected to continue that motion for the next few days, the hurricane center said.