Beijing hit by early heavy snowstorm ahead of pivotal meet 

Published on Nov 04, 2012

Paramilitary police officers shovel snow in a line at the Forbidden City on a rain-snow mixed day, in central Beijing on Nov 4, 2012. China on Sunday continued to warn against blizzards, hiking the alert to the second-highest level on snowstorms that are expected to hit northern regions over the next few days. -- PHOTO: REUTERS

BEIJING (AFP) - Beijing issued its second-highest blizzard alert on Sunday after the Chinese capital was hit by an unusually early snowstorm four days before the start of a key political meeting.

In the 24 hours until Sunday morning, the city saw 5.8cm of precipitation (rain and snow combined), the highest daily total for any cold season since 1951, the Xinhua news agency said.

The weather prompted city and national authorities to issue an "orange alert" - the second of four warning levels. Authorities would activate the capital's public heating ahead of the planned Nov 15 date, Xinhua said.

The national meteorological body on Sunday warned of blizzards in the northern provinces surrounding the capital, which do not normally see snow till the end of the month.

Authorities in nearby Shanxi province temporarily shut 10 highways to avoid accidents, while in Inner Mongolia more than 400 trucks became stuck en route and traffic clogged multiple highways, Xinhua reported.

The ruling Communist Party on Thursday begins its 18th congress, a major political event that will appoint a new leadership for the next decade.

Tale of two New Jersey towns now linked by Sandy 

Published on Nov 04, 2012ASBURY PARK, New Jersey (REUTERS) - Asbury Park and Bay Head are two towns on opposite ends of the Jersey Shore's socio-economic spectrum - one with many poor people, the other with professionals in lucrative Wall Street careers. Superstorm Sandy has swept away many of the differences between the two.

Asbury Park is a faded dowager seaside resort, still struggling to recover from the race riots in the summer of 1970, white flight, a weakened tax base and, more recently, the great recession. Some storefronts facing the ocean were boarded up as Sandy closed in on the town. Other buildings were boarded up long ago.

Sixteen kilometres away, Bay Head is a much smaller community where financiers and hedge fund managers own multimillion-dollar vacation homes and make a 112km commute to Wall Street. A Hollywood studio chief with a Bay Head home captivated his neighbours for many summers with a party attended by celebrities such as Meryl Streep, Oprah Winfrey and Alex Trebek.

Sandy's destructive winds and epic ocean surge lashed New Jersey indiscriminately, killing 24 people and ripping up shorelines and close-in neighbourhoods in hundreds of towns.

Neither wealth nor social station protected anyone.

After Sandy, the famed boardwalk in Asbury Park serenaded by favourite son Bruce Springsteen needs major repairs. Its restaurants and arcades - doing well these past few years during a nascent revival - are shut indefinitely.

In Bay Head, many stately Victorian homes overlooking the beach were so smashed that dozens are condemned and cannot be reoccupied. Some just disappeared.

After the storm has come a silver lining. Like residents all over the state, people in Bay Head and Asbury Park were concerned mostly for one another.

"The storm has brought out the goodwill in everyone, an appreciation of the community," said Mr Ed Johnson, mayor of Asbury Park, which has 16,000 residents. "We're all working together."

Ms Alberta Smith, 61, who lives in Asbury Park on Medicaid and food stamps, said she was overjoyed on Saturday to get a hot meal a second day in a row, served at a community centre in Asbury Park and prepared by an interfaith organisation.

Friday's meat loaf "melted in your mouth", she said. The chicken vegetable medley and mashed potatoes served on Saturday were good, too.

Ms Smith appreciated the meals because she had to throw out the perishable food in her refrigerator that spoiled when power failed. Her canned goods, she said, went only so far.

When Sandy knocked out power, Ms Smith knew her aunt Thelma Wilson would be in trouble because the oxygen machine she used would not work.

"I went to her house to keep her calm - been sitting with her everyday," Ms Smith said as she placed a second hot meal in a bag to take to her aunt.

The Reverend Kevin Nunn, a pastor with the interfaith group, went from table to table handing out new socks. He gave Ms Smith two pairs.

"The pastor's a fine man, and this is a fine town," she said.

Sixteen kilometres south in Bay Head, a four-block-wide community of about 900 year-round residents between the Atlantic and Barnegat Bay, there was so much sand covering the town that several people said it looked like a moonscape.

Since Tuesday, dozens of small front-end loaders were busy scraping sand from the streets and piling it into 1.5m mounds.

Several blocks west of the ocean on Osborne Street, a front yard was covered by 1.2m of sand. A tall fence ringed the yard and airborne sand had evidently been trapped by it in the same way snowdrifts are formed.

In Bay Head, as in Asbury Park, ruined carpets, appliances like washing machines and water heaters, clothing and other household belongings were piled high on the sidewalk outside dozens of homes.

Brothers Chris and Mark Watson were walking along Bay Head's Main Street on Saturday to view a once-in-a-lifetime scene. They had time on their hands - National Guard troops had stopped them at a checkpoint, preventing them from inspecting their family home in Mantoloking, another well-to-do town to the south.

Too much flooding ahead, they were told. They would have to wait several more days.

During the storm, a fire fuelled by natural gas and whipped by Sandy had destroyed million-dollar homes in Mantoloking. The wreckage saddened the Watsons.

"These homes have been in families for generations," Mr Chris Watson said. "I feel sorry for the owners. Everyone feels just so vulnerable."

But what is physically destroyed can be rebuilt. It is the people that matter, Mr Mark Watson said.

"Our prayers are with everyone facing a redefinition of their lives," he said.

At the intersection of North Street and East Avenue, the first block off the beach in Bay Head, three of four houses were either destroyed or seemed on the verge of collapse. One house teetered on its piles and another, with half its foundation gone, tilted severely. Gravity, it seemed, would eventually win out.

A six-bedroom home owned by the Green family had a quarter of its first floor blown away and state officials had placed an orange sticker on it, saying it could not be reoccupied until it was repaired and determined to be structurally sound.

Mr James Green, 22, a currency risk specialist with the global bank HSBC, stood outside the home on Saturday, confident that the house would survive Sandy as it had two centuries of storms.

"Our house is the oldest in Bay Head," he said. "It was built in Point Pleasant in the late 18th century and used at one time as a morgue for shipwrecks. It knows bad weather. A previous owner moved it here in 1893. It has seen a lot of storms and is going to outlast this one."

When Mr Green's mother had first returned to the house after the storm, it saddened her when she saw the bow of a small sailboat he had built in high school sticking from the sand in the back yard. She thought the boat was in pieces all around the place.

But Mr James Green enlisted the help of five people, who dug around the bow and found the boat was intact in several feet of sand.

"I couldn't have dug it out alone," he said.

The boat, which he sailed in local regattas, will be handed down to his children when he has a family - just like he will someday inherit the house on East Avenue and pass it on to the next generation of Greens, he said.

Disappointed NYC marathoners run in aid of Sandy victims 

Published on Nov 04, 2012

NEW YORK (REUTERS) - Hundreds of runners in New York City refused to let a cancelled marathon spoil their Sunday plans, channelling months of preparation into informal runs intended to benefit victims of superstorm Sandy.

Amid criticism from victims of Monday's storm that the race would divert resources from efforts to help flood-ravaged parts of the city, Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday cancelLed Sunday's marathon. The event was expected to draw more than 40,000 runners to the city.

Early on Sunday, more than 1,000 people, many of whom had planned to run the race, crowded onto two Staten Island Ferry boats, headed to the stricken borough with relief supplies ranging from food to plastic bags to help residents store belongings from damaged or destroyed homes.

Central Park also was crowded with runners near what would have been the marathon's finish line, scores of them shivering in the lingering overnight cold. A group called run4allcauses was collecting donations for Sandy victims.

Ms Kelly Rooney, a 31-year-old stay-at-home mother from Florida, was at first irked that Mr Bloomberg called off the marathon after insisting earlier in the week that it would go ahead in spite of Sandy, whose 130kph winds and record surge of seawater devastated coastal communities and killed at least 110 people in the United States.

Ms Rooney travelled with her husband and six-year-old daughter in tow, while her parents flew in from Mexico to cheer her on.

By Saturday afternoon, Ms Rooney was over her disappointment and looking forward to a charity run on hard-hit Staten Island that she had found advertised on the Internet.

On Sunday, Ms Rooney planned to run with a backpack full of dog food, cat food, batteries and some water donated by her hotel, the Ritz-Carlton across from Central Park.

"I truthfully at this point don't care if I run. I just want to give this stuff out," she said.

The idea for the Staten Island run came to 46-year-old Jordan Metzl, a doctor of sports medicine, and his running friends just as the debate was heating up last week about whether storm-battered New York City should hold a marathon.

He was discouraged that the running community was being perceived so negatively when it holds so many races to raise money for a variety of causes.

Mr Metzl expected hundreds of runners to show up for the Staten Island run, including participants from Germany and Italy.

US rower Alison Cox, who won a silver medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics, also was expected to participate.

Ms Lara Duerrschmid, 27, was among those boarding a ferry. "I know it's going to be tough to see (the damage), but I just wanted to do something good," said Ms Duerrschmid, a resident of Manhattan's Upper East Side, which was spared the worst of the storm.

The runners will take different routes across Staten Island and distribute supplies along the way.

Other informal runs will be held on Sunday that loop around Central Park - the original 1970 route of the New York City marathon.

Ms Mindy Solkin, a running coach, already organised a five-mile run on Saturday that started at the marathon's finish line in Central Park.

She also was planning a 42.1km run on Sunday called The Ad Hoc Marathon. Ms Solkin and fellow coaches from The Running Centre in Manhattan planned to be there with water and "power gels" to pass to runners.

Since Friday night, Ms Solkin also had been scrambling to get some of the 50 runners she coaches registered in upcoming marathons in places such as Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Mr Metzl, who has run 29 marathons in his life, said it would be pointless to let well-trained bodies go to waste.

"Initially, we were just going to do a run to raise some money and then we thought, 'Hey, we've got these legs that are ready to run 26 miles. Why don't we actually run in Staten Island and get things that people need?'" he said.

Tens of thousands lose housing in US superstorm 

Published on Nov 05, 2012

NEW YORK (AFP) - Tens of thousands of people in New York need housing after superstorm Sandy, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said on Sunday.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg estimated that 30,000 to 40,000 people in the city alone would need housing after Monday's storm, which left more than 100 dead in 15 US states and Canada and inflicted tens of billions of dollars of damage.

"It is starting to get cold. People are in homes that are uninhabitable," Mr Cuomo said. "We are going to have tens of thousands of people who need housing solutions right away."

About 730,000 people in New York state still do not have electricity, nearly one week after Sandy hit, including more than 130,000 in New York City, the governor said.

With drivers waiting several hours in queues at gas stations to get fuel, Mr Cuomo and Mr Bloomberg appealed for patience and insisted that deliveries are improving.

There are also at least one million people in New Jersey state without electricity. Much of the state is under fuel rationing.