WASHINGTON: Folks on the coast in New Jersey and New York are once again facing evacuations as a nor’easter moves in. Residents in the Rockaways section of New York City and in Brick Township, N.J., have been evacuated, according to Weather.com, which has named the front “Winter Storm Athena.” As many as 676,000 people remain without power this morning, Weather.com also said. The new storm was expected to hit last night after midnight and continue into Thursday.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Public Affairs Director Lars Anderson said this morning that FEMA had more than 5,100 personnel working in the field with local agencies
“We have senior-level emergency management experts in operations, logistics, and recovery embedded, side-by-side with state and local emergency managers throughout New York and New Jersey to ensure clear lines of communication and immediately bring to bear the full resources of the federal government, as needed to respond to the nor’easter or continue to the recovery efforts from Sandy,” he said in a FEMA blog post this morning.
Anderson said FEMA personnel were in the area going door to door to tell people how to register for financial assistance. He said more than 277,000 people had applied, with more than $250,000 million approved.
“At the requests of New York and New Jersey, FEMA is delivering commodities such as food, water, blankets, and generators to distribution points across the region impacted by Sandy, and as those commodities are distributed, we are pre-positioning additional resources and supplies to ensure they are in place if needed by our state and local partners to respond to the nor’easter,” he said.
Because of the continuing power outages, Anderson said state and local governments are opening warming stations. Information on warming stations in New York is available at NYC.gov. Other resources are available from the Office of Emergency Management for New York State, the State of New Jersey Hurricane Sandy Information Center, and Connecticut Gov. Dannel P. Malloy’s website.
