Close to 2.5 Million Without Power in Northeast After Snowstorm
MALVEAUX: Now for stories our iReporters are sending in from the nor'easter. I want you to check out the time lapse as the snow started to hit the region this weekend. So, an iReporter in Oak Ridge, New Jersey, took one photo every minute for eight hours outside his home Saturday. That's amazing. You can see how fast the storm rolled in just by looking at how the trees are actually weighed down. And this is what some neighborhoods look like in Putnam County, New York. An iReporter sent us pictures of giant trees knocked down by the heavy snow. Roofs, completely covered; roads iced over. And in Denville, New Jersey, an iReporter sent us this video of a tree knocked down by the storm. It's over the road, but people were able to drive underneath it. It's kind of a dangerous move with all those downed power lines. Now more on the freak October snowstorm socking the East Coast. We're talking about record snowfall. Hundreds of travelers were stranded, at least five people were killed. Our own Chad Myers, he is weathering the storm in York, Pennsylvania. Chad, I was out there this weekend traveling, had no idea this was going to hit. I was in Maryland. We were lucky. Just a little bit of snow. But where you are, more than two million folks still without power?</s>CHAD MYERS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yes. It had started late on Friday, early on Saturday, and we were the first ones. We were the farthest south, really. We were the first ones to get the snow, but we were also the first ones to get the sunshine yesterday. Look at this. I was standing in 10 to 12 inches of snow 24 hours ago. It is completely gone. But when the snow was here, it was also there, over on those big trees over there. All of those trees still have leaves on them. And this is the problem. This is the rub with this storm. This is not so much of a record-breaking snowfall in December, this is a record-breaking snowfall when the leaves are on. And when the leaves are on the trees, the branches came down, and so did the power lines. That's how we got four million customers without power. Now those power lines are getting back up, but some of them are going to take a very long time when you have all of these power lines down -- and there are many. They're going to try to get as many people on line with one line as possible. If you get one line up, you get 200 people back on, that's a bonus. If you get one line up with only one customer back on, you are the lowest priority. So it's going to take a long time. The good news is now it has warmed up. I'll tell you, it may be, like, 50 degrees out here right now, but this morning it was 25. And some people were telling me that inside their homes this morning this morning it was 55 degrees and it was very cold. That's why people have now gone to hotels, and all the hotels in this area were completely full last night again for the second night in a row. Now, these are families that planned on not spending $125 a night for a hotel, and maybe planned on spending a little bit more for Christmas. So maybe their budget's going to be moved around a little bit, and they're thinking maybe four or five more days having to spend those nights in hotels, rather than spending it at home where it's essentially free.</s>MALVEAUX: Yes. That's too bad. Yes. I saw you all weekend, Chad, out there in that cold weather. I understand that in Worcester, Massachusetts, they're asking folks to postpone trick-or-treating until Tuesday. So, in York, is Halloween canceled there?</s>MYERS: We're OK here. I'm telling you, because the sun came out so fast here, compared to Massachusetts -- which might have been 15 hours later for that sun to come out -- today it will warm up in Massachusetts, but yesterday it was warm here. All the snow is off, all the lines are down, all the trees are down and the lines are getting back up. That's not the case -- they're not to the point yet in Massachusetts. There are still many power lines down. They don't want the kids walking around those power lines. There are still trees that still could come down because there's still snow up there. They don't want those kids under those trees, so it's a safe bet to not trick-or-treat tonight, wait a couple days. The candy's not going to go stale in two days.</s>MALVEAUX: All right. It's not going anywhere. They'll be OK. A couple days to wait. All right. Thank you, Chad. It is Halloween. Expect some strange things. Right? Well, just outside of Atlanta zombies -- yes, I'm talking about zombies -- took to the streets, but it was for a good cause. So, not the usual trick-or-treating that you see. This is the first annual Marietta Zombie Walk.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We need all zombies inside the corral! All zombies make their way inside of the corral!</s>GARY HASTY, ZOMBIE WALK ORGANIZER: Zombies are the new vampires. We're much cooler. We don't eat much. We don't glisten and glitter. We don't have love stories. We're zombies.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The undead keep living forever.</s>MEGHAN HILL, MUST MINISTRIES: The idea was Gary Hasty loves zombies, so he wanted to do a family-friendly zombie walk in his neighborhood. And he wanted to team up with MUST to make it a food drive, because he knew that we were low on food in our food pantry.</s>HASTY: We were expecting for the first year maybe 50, 60 people show up. I think we had 300 or 400 or so.</s>MALVEAUX: Crazy. White House hopeful Herman Cain, he's about to take on a roomful of journalists, and there are some controversial headlines. The accusations and what he's been saying so far.