NEW YORK — A group from Mississippi Valley State University has been trapped in New York by Hurricane Sandy.
Gaining strength and threatening 50 million people, Hurricane Sandy chugged north today, raking ghost-town cities along the Northeast corridor with rain and wind gusts.
Tiffany Wallace, MVSU’s career services director, and five students went to New York to attend the Thurgood Marshall College Fund’s 25th annual Awards Gala and, which included a career fair.
The gala, which was scheduled for tonight, was canceled. So was the MVSU group’s flight back to Mississippi.
Andy Lo of Greenwood, an MVSU graduate student and Commonwealth freelance photographer, said by telephone this morning that the group’s scheduled return flight on Tuesday was canceled.
According to the flight-tracking service FlightAware, nearly 7,500 flights in and out of the East had been canceled for today and Tuesday, almost all related to the storm.
Lo said the MVSU students were being told today that they will fly home on Wednesday.
The group is staying at the Hilton New York in Manhattan.
When reached by telephone this morning, Wallace said she couldn’t talk because she was trying to make arrangements for the group.
In spite of the storm, Lo and said he and other Valley students were attending a career fair at the hotel this morning.
Meanwhile, subways and schools were closed, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange was deserted, and thousands of people fled the low-lying coast.
Forecasters expected the monster hurricane to make a westward lurch and aim for the coast of New Jersey, blowing ashore tonight or early Tuesday and combining with two other weather systems to create an epic superstorm.
Its projected path put New York City and Long Island in the danger zone for a huge surge of seawater made more fearsome by high tides and a full moon.
“This is the worst-case scenario,” said Louis Uccellini, environmental prediction chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Because the storm is so big, with tropical storm-force winds extending almost 500 miles from its center, it could upend daily life for days for people from the East Coast to the Great Lakes. As much as 3 feet of snow was forecast for the West Virginia mountains.
Millions of people in the Northeast stayed home from work. Subways, buses and trains shut down, and more than 7,000 flights in and out of the East were canceled, snarling travel around the globe. Hundreds of thousands of people were under orders to flee the coast, including 375,000 in lower Manhattan and other parts of New York City, but authorities warned that the time to get out was short or already past.
“I think this one’s going to do us in,” said Mark Palazzolo, who boarded up his bait-and-tackle shop in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., with the same wood he used in past storms, crossing out the names of Hurricanes Isaac and Irene and spray-painting “Sandy” next to them.
“I got a call from a friend of mine from Florida last night who said, `Mark, get out! If it’s not the storm, it’ll be the aftermath. People are going to be fighting in the streets over gasoline and food.”’
President Barack Obama declared emergencies in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, authorizing federal relief work to begin well ahead of time. He promised the government would “respond big and respond fast” after the storm hits.
“My message to the governors as well as to the mayors is anything they need, we will be there, and we will cut through red tape,” Obama said. “We are not going to get bogged down with a lot of rules.”
Sandy, a Category 1 hurricane with sustained winds of 85 mph early today, was blamed for 65 deaths in the Caribbean before it began traveling northward, parallel to the Eastern Seaboard. As of 8 a.m. today, it was centered about 310 miles southeast of New York City, moving to the north at 20 mph, with hurricane-force winds extending an extraordinary 175 miles from its center.
Water was already a foot deep on the streets of Lindenhurst, N.Y., along the southern edge of Long Island, and the canals around the island’s Great South Bay were bulging two hours before high tide. Gale-force winds blew overnight over coastal North Carolina, southeastern Virginia, the Delmarva Peninsula and coastal New Jersey.
Forecasters warned that New York City and Long Island could be on the dangerous northeastern edge of the tempest and bear the worst of the storm surge — a wall of seawater up to 11 feet high that could swamp lower Manhattan, flood subway tunnels and cripple the network of electrical and communications lines that are vital to the nation’s financial center.
The major American stock exchanges closed for the day, the first unplanned shutdown since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The floor of the NYSE, typically bustling with traders on a Monday morning, fell within the city’s mandatory evacuation zone. The United Nations canceled all meetings at its New York headquarters.
New York called off school for the city’s 1.1 million students, and the more than 5 million people who depend on its transit network every day were left without a way to get around. Most planned to stay inside anyway.
“If you don’t evacuate, you are not only endangering your life, you are also endangering the lives of the first responders who are going in to rescue you,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned. “This is a serious and dangerous storm.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was typically blunt: “Don’t be stupid. Get out.”
The storm bore down barely a week before the presidential election. Wary of being seen as putting political pursuits ahead of public safety, Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney reshuffled their campaign plans. In Virginia, election officials eased absentee voting requirements for those affected by the storm. Three other closely contested states, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Ohio, were within Sandy’s reach.
