Irene shut down north-east US, New York city spared

Hurricane Irene surged through New York City on Sunday flooding waterfronts and low-lying areas, but America's most populous city avoided the mass devastation some had feared. Irene was downgraded to a tropical storm on Sunday morning and was headed next to pass over parts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.
On its march up the East Coast over the weekend, the storm left at least 12 dead, as many as 3.6 million customers without electricity, widespread flooding and damage to coastal towns in several states. It forced the closure of New York's mass transit system, and the cancellation of thousands of flights.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said there were no reports of deaths or injuries in the city, though there were some close calls - in Staten Island, 50 fire-fighters in boats had rescued 61 adults and 3 babies trapped in five feet of water. While weakened, the swirling storm still packed a wallop, especially in districts such as the Rockaways peninsula, a low-lying strip of land exposed to the Atlantic Ocean on the southern flank of the city. Authorities closed three bridges leading to the peninsula before the storm.
"It was like being in the hull of a ship," said Patricia Keane, 42, who stayed in her home and lost power. She ran backup generators and supplied electricity to pumps for four neighbours with flooded basements.
The city of 8.5 million people is rarely hit by hurricanes and is plagued by aging infrastructure, leading many to issue dire warnings in recent days of what the hurricane could bring. Authorities had taken unprecedented steps to prepare, including mandatory evacuations and a total shutdown of mass transit systems that will have had a major economic impact.
About 370,000 city residents who had been ordered to leave their homes were told they could return at 3 pm EDT (1900 GMT) on Sunday.
The head of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said it was too soon to say when the New York subway system would return to service as there needed to be a line by line assessment of problems. The worst damage was to commuter rail lines running north to Connecticut and towns in New York state, with three lines suffering serious flooding. "All in all we are in pretty good shape," Bloomberg said, adding that, while it would be a "tough commute" on Monday, there had been no long-term damage to the subway system.
New Jersey, home to millions of commuters who travel into New York each day, was hard hit by flooding, downed trees and power outages. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told NBC's "Meet the Press" he expects damages from Irene to be costly, possibly worth billions of dollars, along the Atlantic coast and from inland river flooding.
Bob McDonnell, the governor of Virginia which was hit earlier by the Hurricane, told CNN "We prepared for the worst but came out a little better than expected. Unfortunately now, four fatalities have been confirmed,"
"We've got some significant damage in some areas, from flooding, from wind, a lot of trees down, 2.5 million people or more without power in Virginia, that's the second largest outage in history," he said.
In North Carolina, where authorities confirmed at least six storm-related deaths since the storm made landfall on Saturday, Governor Bev Perdue was expected to request a federal disaster declaration. Irene was still packing tropical storm-force winds of 60 miles per hour as it moved over southern New England.
In Manhattan, where some had predicted massive flooding in the financial district, there was about a foot of water in the streets at the South Street Seaport in Lower Manhattan before the tide began receding mid-morning.