welcome back everybody. thank you for joining us. >> president barack obama will address the nation about hurricane sandy in about 45 minutes. here is a look at what is happening now. more than 400,000 people remain without power. authorities reopened however the bay bridge to traffic in both directions. and metro announced that it will restore bus service but on a sunday schedule. that begins at 2:00 p.m. and all schools in maryland, the district, and northern virginia are closed. montgomery county schools will be opened tomorrow. >> also jc authorities in pasadena, maryland are clearing a down tree that fell on a home

and killed the man inside. authorities say the man was pronounced dead at the scene. his identity has not been released. as the day wears on we're beginning to see the magnitude of sandy's destruction is believed the heavy rains may have caused a leak at this water plant near columbia, maryland. the leak is spewing about two million gallons of raw sewage every house. authorities are asking the people stay clear of the river as a result. >> let's go to howard and get an update on his forecast. howard. >> reporter: hey jc and matt we are looking a a little bit of shower activity and a little bit of -- temperatures running in the mid 40s for highs. that is almost 20 degrees below the average. south westerly winds bringing this cold air as the cold has been wrapped around. actually pulled down from

michigan through ohio making the turn in kentucky and back toward us. fortunately as far as the rain it's becoming from a steady rain more into a showery and a light showery rain here. but it's going to be a raw afternoon. southwest winds 15-20 miles an hour. might gust 25 but we don't have anymore wind advisories. that is all over with now. we are still dealing with some flooding conditions and rainfall totals just very impressive. got an update. finally got to the ten inch mark. winchester hoping for an update. prince frederick that is an updated total. even up in smithburg i imagine bill had a good 6-8 inches of rain. fred lick will crest about 3.4 feet. that will cause moderate to major flooding. potomac eight feet above flood

stage. here's sandy producing snow amounts into a little bit of a mix in the higher elevations. light to occasionally moderate rain showers. we've seen the trend to reduce. we are still seeing a few more of the moderate ones here into western lauren county. there is a lot less yellow on the map. generally west at 15. almost down to about 66 here in north western areas. and then you look at and starting to see breaks showing up in the radar. this is good. we will get down from steady rain to lighter showers that are falling which shouldn't exacerbate the flood situation. unfortunately has a lot of high strings and creates numerous flood warnings. if you see any high water turn around don't drown. your winds gusting to 21 here in town. 20 in annapolis. some of the higher gusts are 25. where the snow has been flying. i saw is a picture there about

a foot to 18 inches of snow. and there is again potentially twice that at canine valley. this is out of oakville, west virginia. you can see the snow here. oak hill, west virginia. this isn't the heavy stuff. this is the lighter stuff. i saw a report at the 4,000- foot level of more than 30 inches of snow. that would smash the state of west virginia all-time october snow record. if they can verify it. they probably will. these are pretty reliable guys reporting it up there. but uncredible. we are seeing all of this very heavy wet snow. temperatures they really do tell the story for the afternoon. only 43 now in d.c.. 39 in winchester. and 43 in easton. and a quick look at windchills before we go. you will feed the jackets. tomorrow 50s. same thing thursday but thursday looks dry. we have been tracking the power outages for us. russ we have improvements on

the numbers? >> reporter: we are. we are just getting to an area where we may fall below 400,000. this is a number that we haven't been close to since last night around 10:00. and you know if we want to look right around this area here we will pull up the potomac eddison area. as we get up here around gaithers burg, frederick they're having significant numbers up there. let's take a look at dominion. those are the ones that are effecting a lot of people in northern virginia. 103,000 people without power. 98,000 of them are in northern virginia. we can take a look at this map. this is a blog that we've been watching develop since last night. really it started hitting hard around 8:00. you look at the red dots the red dots indicate the more significant clusters of power outages. you will see alexandria, the city of fairfax.

this is where the huge blob of unserved customers is. taking a look at proposal koa -- pepco. which has as large customer base has a very small pocket of people without power. you can see there really isn't a pocket. there might be one there and right there where all of their customers have served. all their area codes have people without power. here's the surprising number. out of all their customers, they are reporting currently only 16,000 almost 17,000 without power. and that compared to bge which has a much larger service area but if you want to take a look at that going all the way north past baltimore and all the way down to north beach and i'm going to push this up a little bit you can look at the annapolis area bge is having big numbers right now.

still 185,000 people system- wide. and anne arundel county still 51,000 without power. that being the largest pocket that they have. the numbers are going down. we'll be back later. all right russ, thank you. >> you know d.c. mayor vincent gray has been out and about in the district to survey the damage assed by the hurricane. >> our jessica doyle was behind the mayor getting a look at the debris left behind. jessica joins us live from the bloomingdale area. >> reporter: that is right. good afternoon to both of you. good afternoon to everybody at home. we are here in the bloomingdale section of washington, d.c.. i want to direct your attention behind me. these are some of the national guardsmen that have been following the mayor part of his convoy as they assess the damage. of course, emergency was assessed in the district of columbia. right now they are looking at the damage to see what sort of

-- thank you. mayor gray how do you think we did after hurricane sandy blowing through the last 24 hours? >> i think we have done extremely well. we were fortunate the storm wasn't worse than what it was. but also i'm very proud of the people in the district of columbia. started with our citizens who stayed off the streets. our folks who work for the many agencies in the city they have done a phenomenal job. out already today. trying to get the trees off the streets. we know that we started with a little over 200 trees and they are moving rapidly to try to get them taken care of. obviously focusing initially on those blocking thorough fairs like this street we're on now. >> reporter: we know the drill the trees come down it blocks the street and causes power problems. what are your concerns in terms of flooding? >> we'll see. we are going down to bloomingdale now. we did a lot of work beforehand with the people in bloomingdale to try to mitigate that

situation. it looks like it hasn't been as bad as it would have been. we got all the leaves out. soy think we've done reasonably well there. we will go down and do an inspection of that. but again there are other areas where they could be concerns. like the potomac we will take a look at that. i think we have gotten through the high today area down there and hopefully we will see it recede to some extent. we are going to work as hard as we can to minimize the consequences of that. >> reporter: do you have any expectations that will sort of get back to normal for city services starting tomorrow? >> that is our goal. we are going to hold a press conference later today. to talk about that. we are looking at what the conditions of schools. i'm absolutely certain the district government will be open tomorrow. i'm assuming the federal government will reopen tomorrow. we will do everything we can to

function as normal. >> thank you. >> reporter: we are back here live in the bloomingdale section behind me is the mayor's vehicle. it is expected to roll out of here soon because he's planning a press conference sometime around 12:30 to 1:30. to give a sense of his findings from this assessment. right now he's meeting with neighbors in the section which has experienced flooding as a recurrent problem because of drain problem. i'm going to send it back to you in the studio. >> jest a thank you very much. >> you know scott broom has been in his car. he's been traveling all over. earlier today he was down in ocean city. let's find out where he is now. scott, where are you? >> reporter: well, i'm at the inlet at ocean city. talking to you on my live view camera out the dash board cam of our mobile newsroom. our communication has been choppy today. i will show you around the

inlet parking lot down here today. all of downtown ocean city from seventh street on down is closed to the the public because of the amazing apartment of flooding and over washing they had. there is a lot of debris around. and city officials want to get it cleaned up before people are driving around and popping tires. it's only public safety initials and folks that informing the public down here. let's go for a drive. i want to show you around this parking lot because frankly if you are used to being around here, it's amazing. we are going to hop in the mobile newsroom here. get the seat belt on. where we are driving now is normally a parking lot if you are familiar with the inlet parking lot. in ocean city. it is nothing but sand right now and significant amount of debris around here. some of which has nails and other items in it. so you have to watch what you're doing when you are driving around. out on the sand forrally there is asphalt and cars parked. i do want to show you here what

has become an iconic shot here in ocean city. that is the pier in ocean city. if you look at my finger the pier goes out to about there from there on out it's about another 100 feet and it does not exist anymore. there has been a significant amount of damage down here in ocean city particularly because of the flooding that was coming up on st. louis avenue and some of the other back bay. the route 50 bridge into downtown ocean city is closed at this time. the downtown area is closed as the city tries to get it cleaned up as best it can. ocean city north of 17th street all the way up toughen wick island is open. there is a lot of concerned property owners. prosecute managers and other -- property managers and owners that are trying to assess the damage. beggars island had damage and there have been a number of neighborhoods on the bay side where the lower level properties have been pretty

significantly flooded. if you have a condo on a high raise, probably no big issue. if you're in a frame building down low, back on the bay side, there is a significant chance the properties have been impacted by flooding. so that is the way it looks at ocean city. as i said again, the town is open. it's in recovery mode. there were no injuries here last night. no deaths. but some pretty dramatic effects in the aftermath of this storm. reporting live in ocean city in my mobile newsroom scott broom 9 news now. >> thank you. whether or not you have power we have you covered. make sure your devices are charged so you can watch our live stream on our mobile site or by using our mobi app. both have all the latest information about sandy and its impact. you can get directions on how to down load it by texting the word sandy to 25543.

that will also sign you up for our 9 news text alert. thousands of your neighbors are already using them. stay up to date on closings, outages, and rising water. >> also we have established the phone bank at channel 9 to help you with your storm related problems. (2)895-5560 give us a call we are standing by to help.

all right welcome back to our 9 news storm alert coverage. sandy has drenched our area with record inches of rain and for many homeowners left with the flooded basements and other damage that could mean a call to your insurance company. i'm over here in our storm alert hot line desk with a special guest shirley.

who has been helping consumers for decades in this area so their problems. and boy there are some problems this go around. shirley let's talk about some of the issues people are likely to be calling for help about at this time. >> well, i think one of the big things we are facing in this area is flooded basements, leaky roofs, both of which can cause you serious problems in your home and not only the damage right now but down the road mold. so there is issues that really need to be addressed. we will be here trying to help consumers answer the concerns. >> let's talk about one of the first things you should do when you've got a leaky roof obviously you need to establish where the leak is coming from and you need to make a quick call. >> yes, you really should contact -- first thing you should do is contact your insurance company. make sure you know what will be uncovered in your insurance. you may have insurance against us. insurance company may want to sec out an adjustor to see what kind of dang there is.

or wow may want to get your -- or you may want to get your own person. then analyze what is going on. where is the water coming from? sometimes it's very hard to tell. if you've got water in the walls and you're seeing a blistering in the paint, you may very well have a problem with your down spouts that may fix the problem. so the big thing for consumers is don't panic, take your time, analyze the situation and call us if you need help. >> and clearly they need to take a look at their policies. what a lot of people don't realize your homeowners policy may not cover a lot of flooding. you need a flooding policy for that. at this point it's too late to get it. you would have needed to purchase that flood insurance policy. you needed to have it for 30 days. at this point you need to see what your insurance covers right now. >> i think that is correct. insurance companies stop selling flood insurance when there was a warning of a flood. possible flood. they're not crazy. i don't blame them if you live in an area that is prone to

flooding, this is perhaps something you should consider getting. it depends for a lot of people their homes are not subject to flooding. but it all depends on where you are. the biggest thing to do is to analyze your problem. figure out what they really are and you're going to find that they are going to be a lot of crooks coming around knocking on your door. i often think they sit outside the community gates waiting for some disaster to happen. >> this is prime time for them to really kind of swarm. because they know you're in a desperate situation. you need help quickly. they know you have to act quickly. and sometimes their intention intentions are not very good. >> that is exactly right. in addition to that i have received three e-mails already offering me emergency loans. the kicker they want access to my bank account so they can make a direct deposit. not going to do that. >> and that is just one of the things that we're talking about. we're already warning people about these kind of things.

i know maryland's attorney doug was worried about potential gouging. people need to have this on their radar. >> yes, you need to be aware this thing happens. you need to get estimates. don't jump at the first person that comes along. especially if you have a situation where you can't really analyze the damage. and one of the areas for consumers is when they are talking about home repair. i mean roof repair. you are not up there. you don't know what is going on. there is tactics we can give you on how to do that. going up stairs in your neighbor's house with by knack alreadies to see what your roof looks. >> that is something many people don't know. shirley will be taking your calls as well here at our storm alert desk. (202)895-5560. if you have a consumer question there is a strong chance shirley has heard it and answered it in the past. she is going to be here with us through our coverage today to take your calls.

the number (202)895-5560. we want to see the phone lines light up. we want to make sure we are getting you the information you need because we know while the storm may have passed, the damage that you may face from this storm has not. there is still a lot of issues that can come down the line. flooding is still a possibility days from now. >> it's another kind of storm that we will be dealing with right now and it doesn't have to do with the weather. it has to do with all the repairs that need to be done. >> all right shirley. we will let you get to the phones. back to you. >> thank you. thank you very much. i hate to sound like we're patting our sounds on the back but what a wonderful service that is. >> yes. they help people. the hot line helps people all over the country. call for action shirley and leslie. the atlantic sea board was battered by sandy's powerful winds and surf.

>> that is right. >> reporter: well hello. good morning. i'm here to bring a little bit of a bright spot to us on a very what can be a very dark day. i'm roe hobbist beach. been here since sunday at 4:00. i'm so pleased to report just look at the beautiful sand and board walk here. we still have dark skies but the beach held up just beautifully in hurricane sandy. and you know we were here because we didn't think it would be that way. we thought this place was going to get really hard. instead it was places like ocean city, atlantic city. it was really one of the few spots that was spared by hurricane sandy. now earlier this morning i was up just about ten miles northwest of here in a place called louis beach. on the delaware side. that is the area one community we are very concerned about seeing a lot of flooding from

the bay side. fortunately it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been. there was quite a bit of street flooding there and joining me now are two people from louis beach. you guys road out the storm last night. how was it? >> that we did. we road out the storm. we lost a lot of shingles off our roof. we are just along the canal in louis. and we are missing a screened in porch and some shingles but we consider ourselves pretty lucky. and we kept our electricity. the town of louis lost their electricity but we actually kept ours going. kudos to delaware electric coop. >> reporter: how long have you lived here? >> 22 years now. >> reporter: how would you stack up sandy to other hurricanes and nor'easters you have seen? >> this is the worst. definitely the waves. the waves here at the beach were about 14 feet on sunday. and they are still pretty high now. >> reporter: they are very high. if we can actually just look out here.

oh they are gone now. but there were some lots of surfers out here. there they are. i'm looking over. the wrong side. a lot of surfers out here enjoying the waves. if you think that this was probably the worst, when you came out here and saw this i -- >> i thought the board walk would be taken out this time. 1962 we lost the whole board walk and part of the hotel down at the end. so i think since they did the beach restoration and they put all these dunes in which weren't here about five years ago, i think that is what saved the board walk and the store fronts here. >> >> reporter: thanks for chatting with me. appreciate it. i'll let you get back to enjoying the waves. that is really what we are seeing right now. out here on the beach. a lot of people out and about. the cabin fever really starting to sit in. people here were on a mandatory no driving restriction.

for 24 hours. so as soon as that driving restriction was lifted, at around 8:30 this morning, the streets suddenly became packed with people. folks walking their dogs, kids, surfers, everybody is out now. and of course there is a still a bit of cleanup needed here. i will show you a little bit about where this cleanup needs to take place. if you can follow me up this way. lots of sand was blown up during these bigger gusts we were getting during the height of the storm. and the waves forcing a lot of this sand way down here underneath the board walk. not a ton of damage but it will take a lot of time to refill all of these walkways. this is one hole of hundreds that stretch all the way down the board walk here. a lot of cleanup. i think by in large this sentiment here we were really spared here. and now our thoughts and

prayers are all heading to the folks up in new york, new jersey, ocean city, atlantic city, the places that got hit really hard. back to you. >> thank you very much. big congress of the storm is power outages. and rob joins us from bge to give us a sense of how they are doing. rob good afternoon. thanks for joining us on a busy afternoon for you all. caller: yes. a very busy time for us. but the numbers while it's still quite a bit of outages for us it's still a number that i'm pleased to see relative to what we thought we would be seeing. we are talking about 184,000 roughly outages right now. the good news is that we've restored about 113,000 customers already. we were out in the storm yesterday. we've been now since early this morning actually about 1:30 we lifted our wind restriction on our bucket trucks and operators. we began operating in the areas

where we could actually have a buffer. between where the wind was blowing and the work that we were conducting. and that allowed us to get some work done that we ordinary might not have been able to perform. so we will keep at it. we've got about 4100 folks that are working this storm of which almost 2,000 are from out of state. we will continue tie tack this pretty aggressively today. >> rob, even though we didn't get the brunt of the storm, obviously not nearly as bad as they did up north in new york and new jersey and that area, we still had sustained winds high sustained winds for a long period of time. a lot of people here jc and myself and a lot of us here are surprised we didn't have more outages. do you have an explanation for why we didn't? and i'll give you a chance to pat yourself and bge on the back here it had a chance food with the tree trimming. caller: i think that has something to do with it.

that there is no reason that could be it solely. i think we were fortunate with it the time of the year. some of the trees have already lost their leaves. the leaves on the trees were probably ready to come or close to coming off the trees. so in a sense we probably were the beneficiary in some respects in heavy wind that took off the leaves and made them less prone to being almost like an umbrella or parachute where the winds gets into them and pulls them out of the ground. i would be very quick to say we should not get comfortable with the fact these numbers are relatively low at this point. we are going to see more outages over time. we may see more outages over the next few weeks and months frankly because the trees will be in a weakened state. but dim the day i think we all would agree that this is a more manageable than i think we were expecting to see after a storm

like that. the one that blew through. >> when do you expect everybody to be back on at least from this initial set of outages? caller: well, we haven't put anything out yet. what we are sigh saying the storm has to depart our area before we can go ahead and fully asises and -- assess and get a global estimated time. it takes about 24-48 hours to do that. the storm will clear our system later today. we still have wind out there frankly and we will have wind tomorrow. my guess is we will be putting out a global estimated time sometime tomorrow or thursday. then we will be very, very careful with what we put out in terms of individual or estimated times of restoration. the last thing we want to do is put something out there that we know we cannot stand behind or that we might not be able to stand behind. >> rob from bge thanks for your time. good luck down the road. caller: thank you. flooding is always a big