Hundreds of Thousands Without Power, NJ Rivers Flood

The day after a powerful Nor'easter blew through the Tri-State region, the damage has been done.

In Wayne, NJ on the Passaic River, and in Bound Brook and Manville farther to the south, homeowners have been evacuated because of raging waters.

"Severe flooding" is how a dispatcher for the Manville Police Department on the Raritan River described conditions in his town.

He added there's a "voluntary evacuation" order for the Lost Valley section of Manville. Just over ten years ago, the hundreds of homes in Lost Valley were swamped by the rising Raritan, after the remnants of Hurricane Floyd parked themselves over that part of New Jersey for nearly a day.

It was even worse in neigborhing Bound Brook, where people were stranded in their apartments above downtown businesses and had to be rescued by units of the NYPD who were called in for help.

Bound Brook has taken another hit from this weekend's Nor'easter. Despite a flood control project that is scheduled to be finished in the next couple of years, flooding once again is being reported downtown. And once again people are being evacuated.

As for power outages, they can be described in one word. Extensive.

PSE&G, New Jersey's largest utility, was, at its worst, facing power outages for 10% of its 2.1 Million customers.

JCP&L, the second largest utility in the Garden State, had 15% of its 1.1 million customers without power at the worst of the storm.

"We have 140 crews coming in from Ohio and Pennsylvania," said JCP&L spokesman Ron Morano, who added that most, but not all customers should be back on line by the end of Sunday.

The outages across the region were extensive.

"Con Edison crews are working around the clock," the company said in a statement. Some 167,000 customers were without power at one point, nearly half of them in Westchester County.

On Long Island, LIPA reported 111,000 customers without no electricity at the worst of the storm.

And in Connecticut, Connecticut Power and Light had nearly 80,000 customers without power, while United Illuminating had just over 6,000.