If you are in an area on the eastern seaboard and you have power and you know somebody who does not have power, try to listen closely to the information we are going to give you in this hour and pass along that information to someone who does not have power. And if you do have power tonight and you have a home and a roof above your head, consider yourself very lucky because there are many people right now in this city and elsewhere along the eastern seaboard who do not. 

 

I want to show you the scene where I’m standing in, in the Chelsea neighborhood in New York City. No one died in the building over there, the building behind me here on the border between Chelsea and Greenwich Village but the picture says a lot. The entire facade of this apartment building ripped off, fell last night. Those four rooms tell the story in miniature. There is actually an illegal hotel. There were a group of Australians, I’m told, staying in one of the rooms on the top floor. They left moments before the façade crumbled. Thankfully, no one was killed, no one was injured in this, but elsewhere, lives have been lost as I said. We know 18 now confirmed in New York City. Also, in midtown Manhattan, a dangling crane, something else entirely, a dagger pointing 90 stories down. Still thousands in a nearby hotel and apartments have been evacuated. They were evacuated yesterday and today anyone in that area paused for a long time and looked skyward wondering what might happen to that crane dangling over the street. 

 

Local airports flooded. Three quarters of a million New Yorkers are without power tonight. But even that staggering figure and all the damage to America’s biggest city is simply dwarfed by what Sandy has done and is still doing, we should point out, to the lives of tens of millions of people in the thousand mile path of this storm. Entire neighborhoods in New Jersey, New Jersey the hardest hit state, simply do not exist anymore. They’ve been washed away. Others, flooded. President Obama and New Jersey’s Governor Chris Christie are going to tour the damage tomorrow. We learned that earlier today. What they will be seeing and what we’ll be showing you tonight, well, it covers an awful lot of ground, a lot of cold, wet ground. Here’s Jason Carroll. 

 

A disaster still ongoing. The images, overwhelming. 

 

“This was a devastating storm. “

 

A tanker onshore. 

 

“It is beyond anything I thought I’d ever see.” 

 

Miles of shoreline washed away. Home after oceanfront home surrounded by water, yet consumed by fire. In West Virginia, and across the Appalachians, ice and snow, all of it, all of this, the legacy of Sandy. A super storm that’s living up to the name, as bad as the billing, as terrible as the forecast.