Hurricane Irene

HARTFORD, Conn. -- Jane Pulcini was walking up the stairs in her Newington, Conn., home Sunday around 11 a.m. when Hurricane Irene split an oak tree in her front yard, crashing a huge limb into the roof.

"So I'm going up the stairs, and I thought I heard thunder," said Pulcini, who raised five sons in the house and lived there with her husband, Guido "Guy" Pulcini, until he died a year and a half ago. "The noise was so loud, I just couldn't imagine what it was."

Sitting on the stairs of her 1960s split-level Garrison colonial, she could see the tree through a front window. Since moving to the home in 1963, she has filed three insurance claims. Two were this year -- one for ice damming on the roof last winter and now the oak tree. Pulcini had just put on a new room in July.

"Why couldn't the tree fall toward the street?" she said.

By Tuesday, Scott Wallquist, a claims adjuster with The Travelers Cos., was walking on her roof, measuring the square footage and surveying the damage. Front and back gutters would need to be replaced, she would need a new roof, and he plans to hire an inspector to see if the chimney still intact.

WASHINGTON — The head of the federal disaster assistance agency says recovery efforts in the wake of Hurricane Irene will proceed regardless of a dwindling emergency fund.

NEWFANE, Vt. -- National Guard helicopters rushed food and water Tuesday to a dozen cut-off Vermont towns after the rainy remnants of Hurricane Irene washed out roads and bridges in a deluge that took many people in the landlocked New England state by surprise.

NEWFANE, Vt. — Entire towns in Vermont and New York remained cut off by flooding, some communities were still warily watching swollen rivers and over a million people from Virginia to Maine had no electricity on Tuesday, three days after Hurricane Irene slammed into the Eastern Seaboard.

NEW YORK -- The storm that had been Hurricane Irene crossed into Canada overnight but wasn't yet through with the U.S., where flood waters threatened Vermont towns and New Yorkers who returned to work had to make do with a slowly reopening transit system.

The storm left millions without power across much of the Eastern Seaboard, left at least two dozen dead and forced airlines to cancel about 9,000 flights. It never became the big-city nightmare forecasters and public officials had warned about, but it still had the ability to surprise.

WILMINGTON, N.C. -- With Irene gone, cleanup crews began pumping water out of soggy subway tunnels, fixing traffic lights in the nation's capital and clearing debris from hundreds of roads as the East Coast readied for the workweek. While early indications were that the damage was not as bad as feared, it will be days before things get back to normal in many places.

More than 4 million homes and businesses along the coast still did not have power Sunday. Roads were impassable because of high water, fallen trees and downed power lines. And while the full extent of the damage was not known, early estimates put it in the billions of dollars.

MOREHEAD CITY, N.C. -- Hurricane-force winds and drenching rains from Irene battered the North Carolina coast early Saturday as the storm began its potentially catastrophic run up the Eastern Seaboard. More than 2 million people were told to move to safer places, and New York City ordered the nation's biggest subway system shut down for the first time because of a natural disaster.

The National Hurricane Center in Miami said Irene's maximum sustained winds were around 85 mph on Saturday morning, down from about 100 mph a day earlier. But they warned the hurricane would remain a large and powerful one throughout the day as it trekked toward the mid-Atlantic.