East Coast Power Outages Could Last For Days, Claim 13 Lives

Violent storms along the East Coast have left three million people without power and have killed at least 13. Now officials are worried that amid rising temperatures some residents will not have power restored for days.

The situation has become so bad that state of emergencies have been called for in Maryland, West Virginia, Ohio, the District of Columbia and Virginia. In Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell called the outages the worst “non-hurricane” outages in state history, nothing that it is a “very dangerous situation.

In Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley revealed that utility crews from as far away as Texas and Florida were working in the area to untangle tree limbs and restore downed power lines. According to O’Malley the problem was exacerbated by the fact that unlike a Hurricane it arrived with no warning and therefore no time to prepare.

In Washington’s northern Virginia suburbs callers couldn’t even get through to 911 service centers and had to call local police and fire department numbers to receive help. In some cases cell phone services were down and gas stations were not operating because of power issues.

In New Jersey Governor Chris Christie ordered the National Guard to deliver water to stricken areas and to provide fuel generators as needed. As expected New Jersey’s more tourist based areas such as Atlantic City casino’s have regained full power.

The problems extended all the way into Illinois where 78 inmates from Dixon prison were transferred to Pontiac Correctional Center after a storm knocked out power.

As you may have read on Inquisitr earlier this morning, the storm even managed to topple major internet services for several hours on Saturday night including Pinterest, Netflix and Instagram.

People without power in high temperature areas, especially senior citizens are urged to find local shelter centers until power can be restored.