Super Storm Sandy Devastates U.S. East Coast; Interview with Mayor Cory Booker; Another Huge Fire Breaks Out After Sandy; Obama Headed To New Jersey Today; New Jersey Rails Devastated; Obama To Tour Storm Damaged Jersey Shore; Virginia Bomb Explosions; Recovery Will Be "A Mammoth Job"; Sandy's Impact On Travel
SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: Good morning, welcome, everybody. Our starting point this morning: surviving Sandy. Recovery begins in the wake of this superstorm as nearly 7 million people remain in the dark. Thirty-three Americans killed; entire communities under water. Desperate for help, thousands rescued from the floodwaters. Many more of them still need help even as those waters begin to recede. Eighty homes gone. A fire rips through a quiet community in Queens, New York, leaves nothing but ashes. Now there's danger from methane gas. At a standstill, New York City's subway system remains shut down. Could be days before many northeast transit systems are able to get back to normal. Touring the damage this morning, President Obama heading to New Jersey to see the destruction for himself. Alongside him will be Governor Chris Christie. The election just six days away. And Sandy unfortunately is not done yet. The superstorm is currently over Pennsylvania and heading towards Canada. CNN covering the story like no other network. Rob Marciano reporting for us this morning. Deb Feyerick here in New York. Sandra Endo, Brian Todd are reporting from New Jersey for us. And Dan Lothian is at the White House. It's Wednesday, October 31, and STARTING POINT begins right now. Welcome back, everybody. Our starting point is breaking news this morning in Breezy Point, Queens where we've soon showing you some of these pictures yesterday, that massive fire that burned 80 homes to the ground when hurricane Sandy hit New York City. A CNN crew on the scene is reporting to us a strong smell of methane gas. A utility pole spontaneously burst into flames earlier this morning. FDNY Officials are now assessing whether the gas levels there are excessively high in this neighborhood, and that could force those fire crews to evacuate. Right now, 6.6 million people still without electricity across 15 states and Washington, D.C. Nearly 2 million of them are here in New York where flooded subways has transportation at a virtual standstill, not to mention all the property damage and destruction, including those 80 homes that were consumed by that fire in Queens. Recovery from super-storm Sandy could be, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg is calling it, a massive, a mammoth job. Meteorologist Rob Marciano is in Chelsea, New York, this morning with the latest on the damage there. Rob, good morning.</s>ROB MARCIANO, METEOROLOGIST: Good morning, Soledad. Well, some of the damage behind me, one of a few buildings that were ripped off. Nobody hurt miraculously. Lower Manhattan is still in the dark. Day two now and it could be several more before it's all said and done. The estimates are between two and four days before places south basically of about 30th street will be back online. You go outside of the city and up towards Westchester County, it could be as much as ten days. Just down the street from us the Con Ed headquarters, yesterday we chased down the incident commander there up in the war room or situation room as they call it. We got his thoughts on the storm in general, and the system that he has to supervise.</s>JOHN MIKSAD, SENIOR VP, CON ED: Substations are only part of the problem. We had the luxury of an underground network in Manhattan. There are no poles. No wires. It's very reliable, most reliable system in the country. But it's not designed to mixed with salt water, sea water. So that's something we're going to have to look at, especially if these things start happening more frequently.</s>MARCIANO: So the substation that pretty much controls all lower Manhattan is on 14th and 1st Avenue. So that got flooded. It was built to withstand a 12.6 foot storm surge, that would be historic. That's what we're dealing with. There've been several people coming in across our area without power. You have been without power for a couple of days. You're going to go to work today. You're going to walk. How many blocks?</s>DENNIS BESLIC, LOCAL RESIDENT WITHOUT POWER: Walking, about 40 blocks to get to work. Been without power since Monday night. Spent all of yesterday just trying to get uptown to where they do have electricity to buy food, batteries, got a pizza to bring home.</s>MARCIANO: People go without power outside of New York all the time, but is this different in New York for some reason, elevators in the buildings, for one. How are you and your neighbors reacting to this in general?</s>BESLIC: I mean, we are lucky in that we are on the second floor, so it's not too big a walk up. And you know, you just try to get by. For me, kind of the scary thing was seeing the side of this building fall down. We saw the pictures Monday night while the storm was still going on. So that was a little scary. But yes, you get your supplies to make do with what you have and you hunker down. That's what we've been doing.</s>MARCIANO: Trying to get back to normal. Good luck. That's the message. Yesterday was kind of a, you know, a bit of a shock, now we're getting to recovery and obviously the message is try to get back to normal as much as you can. But with the infrastructure shut down, with electricity out and mass transit still, you know, crippled, it's going to be a problem. Isn't it?</s>O'BRIEN: Yes, it's hard to say get back to normal. Thanks, Rob. Appreciate that. President Obama is going to be touring storm-ravaged New Jersey today along with Governor Chris Christie. They're both getting an eyeful in Hoboken across the river from Manhattan. They've called in the National Guard to assist with evacuations there. In Bergen County a berm breach left hundreds of homes submerged. About 1,000 people have already been rescued. More could be trapped. And in the Atlantic City area, where Sandy made landfall, entire neighborhoods are now buried in sand and debris. Sandra Endo is live for us in Atlantic City this morning. Good morning, Sandra.</s>SANDRA ENDO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Soledad. The rescue and recovery effort is under way here in Atlantic City. We're on a main street here in Atlantic City. Several blocks from the waterfront of this bayside community, and to give you an idea of just how far that flooding was in effect here, look at this kayak that was washed ashore right here on this main drag. And also take a look at this. This is a small houseboat that was ripped, torn apart from the pier. You could see it was tied on to a piling right here and this was basically washed ashore, and is stuck in the middle of this intersection. And this is the kind of damage that President Obama will see firsthand when he comes here later this afternoon. He will also talk to first responders here and victims of this storm. As you mentioned, Soledad, he will be joined by a Republican Mitt Romney supporter, actually, Governor Chris Christie. And the Governor said this is not about politics. This is time to get New Jersey back on its feet. Six people died here, 2.6 million people lost power because of this storm. President Obama took three days off of the campaign trail because of the storm, and now he really has to straddle that fine line of coming here to console families, to look at all this devastation, while trying not to make it look overtly like a photo-op. So certainly it will be interesting to hear what he has to say and that image of him with Republican Governor Chris Christie later here this afternoon. Soledad?</s>O'BRIEN: I have to imagine both will say this is not the time for politics. This is a time for rescuing those who need to be rescued and rebuilding those who lost everything. Thank you, Sandra. In a few minutes we're going to be talking with Newark, New Jersey Mayor Cory Booker. John Berman has a look at some of the other stories making news this morning. Good morning.</s>JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: Thanks, Soledad. We have some breaking news this morning. These are pictures you're going to be looking at of fires burning on that barrier island. Fire crews working to reach the island to put out the fire. We don't have any retails yet on how it started. You'll want to stay with CNN for all the breaking details on this story. Again they're having a hard time getting there. Other news, 12 tons, 250,000 pounds still dangling 90 stories up, you're looking at live pictures in New York City. It could take weeks to secure this huge crane boom left dangling by Sandy. And the plan may involve getting a new crane up there, in order to secure it. This you're looking at here is video of the moment the boom collapsed. There it goes. And when asked how secure it is right now, Mayor Michael Bloomberg responded, nobody knows. Reassuring. New York City police airlifting six people off their rooftops in Staten Island to safety. Five adults and one child were stranded by rising floodwaters. The helicopter used in the rescue is named 23, in honor of the 23 NYPD officers who died on September 11, 2001. Six days now until Election Day and new polling out this morning from three critical battleground states, the latest CBS/"New York times"/Quinnipiac Poll has the President with a five-point lead in Ohio, with Virginia and Florida much higher but also ever so slightly in the President's favor. A new CNN poll of polls shows Mitt Romney holding a one-point advantage over the President nationally. The Romney campaign hits the reset button today after being idled by super-storm Sandy briefly. The Republican challenger makes three campaign stops, all in Florida, attending rallies at Tampa, Coral Gables, and Jacksonville. His campaign was buoyed by an endorsement from "The Telegraph" in Nashua, New Hampshire. The editorial board writes "We are confident Romney is the candidate who would tackle serious issues facing this nation starting with jobs, the economy and the debt. In the end we couldn't say the same about the President." That paper endorsed Barack Obama in 2008. And we're getting late word that Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan will kick off a four-day tour starting on Friday. They'll be joined by their wimps and some 100 other surrogates will be standing out around the country, among them secretary of state Condoleezza rice, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida.</s>O'BRIEN: Talk about a final push.</s>BERMAN: We guarantee it for Barack Obama, too, we just don't have the details yet. And Tuesday is election night. Finally you will want to join CNN's live coverage of election night in America beginning at 6:00 p.m. eastern time. It's upon us next Tuesday night.</s>O'BRIEN: In the dark with candles. Hopefully not. Back to our STARTING POINT this morning, states from North Carolina are still dealing with power outages from super storm Sandy. Cory Booker has been out on the streets of Newark, New Jersey, helping residents there, also taking requests. He joins us by phone now. What do you think the biggest problem is in your state? Is it power outages?</s>MAYOR CORY BOOKER, (D) NEWARK, NEW JERSEY: Well, definitely the power outages. We're starting to get back to many residents but we still have tens of thousands of people without power. That poses a lot of challenges. We've had some carbon monoxide problems. We've had, unfortunately, fires. Firefighters doing a lot of work right now in power outage related incidents. And then you have people who rely on power for medication refrigeration, for medical devices, elderly trapped in high rises who really can't get down ten, 15-plus flights of stairs. So we've been scanning out around the city doing our best to service people, from delivering hot meals, to just keeping our medical personnel up and down in high rises, checking in on people, transporting people who need it. But this is going to be, you know, difficult days ahead as the power slowly gets restored.</s>O'BRIEN: We've been looking at pictures while you've been talking from not only Newark but also from some of the cities and towns around Newark where they've had massive damage. You can see seaside where there's tons of sand in people's homes, the flooding that's taking place. Really, New Jersey has been hit very, very hard. How many folks do you have still in shelters?</s>BOOKER: Well, you know, first of all, I just want to say that you know, as I go around the city and my sentiments are the same, the sections of New Jersey were hit so much harder than Newark, really a devastating impact on entire neighborhoods, towns, displacing thousands, hundreds and hundreds of thousands without power. So our hearts and prayers are with our fellow New Jerseyans as they deal with this difficult time. I've been in and out of our shelters a lot the last 24 hours. We've had hundreds of people coming in and going out. Tonight we still have in our main shelter between 100 and 200 people. It's going to be a challenging time. We know we have difficulties ahead in Newark. Upstate right now is the worst crisis we've seen in a long time and all of us here are just praying as the challenges continue that families and communities are able to pull through. We just faced a very, very strong storm. But I know here in the state of New Jersey we are strong.</s>O'BRIEN: Many politicians, frankly, don't really want to talk about politics at this time because you've got citizens you're trying to help or rescue in some cases. But I want to ask you a political question. Many have been talking about the New Jersey governor Chris Christie who's been praising the President for his response to helping out in New Jersey. I want to play a little bit about what governor Christie told me yesterday and ask a question on the other side.</s>GOV. CHRIS CHRISTIE, (R) NEW JERSEY: I have to say, Soledad, right now I'm much more concerned about preventing any other loss of life, getting people to safe places, and then we'll worry about the election. The election will take care of itself. I spoke to the President three times yesterday. He's been incredibly supportive and helpful to our state, and not once did he bring up the election.</s>O'BRIEN: You know governor Christie has, you know, I don't need to tell you this, he's sort of "I call it as I see it" kind of guy. Many people have found this surprising. Do you find that surprising?</s>BOOKER: Not at all. We are in a state of crisis all across this state. And you know, when you're in a crisis, you don't stop and ask your fellow New Jerseyan, your first responder, you don't ask if they're Republican or democrat, you don't ask them how they choose to pray to their god. You just pull together and do what's necessary. And when it comes to responders, we advocate in New Jersey, federal, state, county and local people all working. And let's call it as it is. President Obama has been really hands-on in this. The Governor's heard from him numerous times. I've been on calls with him numerous times. He's taking a personal interest. He's been reaching out to the head of PSE&G;, talking directly to that CEO. So he's been doing an incredible job, cutting through red tape, connecting directly to those affected. And I saw it late last night in one of our public housing authorities, the floods, power outages, the challenges, looked him in the eye and let them know that the President -- I talked directly to the President. He has a direct concern about what is happening right here on the ground. So this isn't politics. Right now this is just people, human beings, facing human tragedy, and pulling together to do something.</s>O'BRIEN: Mayor Cory Booker joining us this morning by phone. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Appreciate your time. Good luck with all the cleanup, not only in your city. Still ahead this morning, we're going to talk about these homes that were burned to the ground. This is the "Daily News" this morning. Take a look at this picture. Look at this. It's a little tough to see but these are homes that have been burned, this entire swath in Queens, New York. We're going to talk to a man that lost the house he lived in for 35 years in this deaf stating fire that consumed breezy point Queens. And the fury of super storm Sandy. You may not believe your eyes when you see what happened to this tree. That's ahead. Christine has a look at what's coming up in business news.</s>CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN ANCHOR: Until Sandy hit it had been 100 years since the New York stock exchange was closed for two days because of weather. In 1888, a blizzard back then. What does today have in store? Markets open today. You're watching STARTING POINT.