Storm hits Maryland with everything -- waves, wind, snow
ANNAPOLIS, Md. -- As super storm Sandy made its way across Maryland late Monday night, state officials warned that the worst of the damage was yet to come.
“We’re America’s weather in miniature today,” Gov. Martin O’Malley said at a news conference. “We’ve got the blizzard on one side. We’ve got the waves on the Atlantic, we’ve got the tidals and the flooding.”
After making landfall near southern New Jersey with hurricane-force winds, Sandy was parked over Maryland, whipping the state with wind, rain and snow.
Blizzard conditions in the West caused a traffic jam on a major interstate, floodwater inundated Baltimore, and the Annapolis area took a pounding from unrelenting rain and gale-force winds. More than 180,000 customers were without power.
And a 2- to 4-foot storm surge had yet to swell into Chesapeake Bay. Winds out of the north were expected to shift to the South by Tuesday morning, causing the bay to swell in the afternoon and evening.
The far eastern part of the state felt the brunt of Sandy’s force on Monday. A storm surge that hit Ocean City was considered the worst since Hurricane Gloria in 1985, according to the Baltimore Sun. About 30 people who had refused to evacuate from the downtown area were rescued by the National Guard on Monday afternoon.
But O’Malley said that Ocean City appeared to be “holding up OK.” He warned that “the next hour will tell.”
In total, about 1,200 Marylanders had evacuated to one of the 41 shelters across the state. Sandy was also believed to be the cause of a traffic accident that killed a woman in Montgomery County on Monday.
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