East Coast Begins Hurricane Bob Cleanup : Storm: At least 16 killed between the Carolinas and Canada. The amount of damage in Massachusetts alone is put at $1 billion.

Cleanup and repairs got under way Tuesday in the wake of Hurricane Bob, which knocked out power to 2.1 million customers and left at least 16 people dead between the Carolinas and eastern Canada.

“I didn’t think we’d get hit this badly,” said George Merrell, owner of Westfield Orchard in Plainfield, Conn., who estimated that he lost several thousand bushels of apples, worth about $8 a bushel.

Officials said Hurricane Bob did not appear to wreak as much damage as Hurricane Gloria in 1985. But Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld estimated damage in his state at $1 billion.

Rhode Island Gov. Bruce G. Sundlun has already written to President Bush seeking disaster aid, and other states were expected to follow suit. Sundlun activated National Guard units to help in the cleanup and patrol flooded areas.

So many trees and limbs were down in Warwick, R.I., that the Public Works Department put snowplows on trucks to shove debris off roads. Numerous small boats were blown aground. Waves smashed a seawall at Newport, R.I.

The hurricane, which had a maximum sustained wind speed of about 105 m.p.h. when it roared ashore Monday, was the first hurricane to hit the Northeast since Hurricane Gloria.

After rushing northward parallel to the East Coast, it hammered the eastern tip of New York’s Long Island, and then the center of the storm cut across Rhode Island, eastern Massachusetts, the corner of New Hampshire and into Maine.

It crossed into Canada early Tuesday and by midday its scattered remnants had moved out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Thousands of people fled the coast for shelters during the storm.

Of the 2.1 million businesses and homes without power after the storm, repair crews from all the Northeast late Tuesday still were trying to restore electricity to 200,000 homes and businesses on New York’s Long Island, 150,000 in Connecticut, 150,000 in Rhode Island, 240,000 in Massachusetts and 59,000 in Maine.

Scattered telephone outages also were reported.

About 50 million gallons of untreated sewage flowed into Narragansett Bay because Rhode Island sewers could not handle the heavy rain.

Despite high wind and heavy rain--up to eight inches at Gorham, Me.--officials felt the region was spared much greater damage because the storm whipped through so quickly, at 35 to 45 m.p.h.

“Primarily what we’re seeing was windstorm damage and fortunately very little flooding damage, thank God,” said Ed Thomas, chief of disaster assistance programs for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Selectmen on the island of Martha’s Vineyard predicted that it would take at least a week before the town was back to normal. They feared that the storm and its aftermath would choke off the final weeks of the multimillion-dollar tourist season.