Easton Residents Could Spend Days in the Dark

Brandy Cameron has an 8-year-old daughter, a 7-week-old baby, and her eye on Nov. 2, the day her lights might come back on.

"They said Friday at the latest, so..."

There wasn't an end to that sentence, just a despairing sigh.

It was Wednesday afternoon, two days since Hurricane Sandy knocked her power out, and she and her daughters were at the Salvation Army in Easton to get warm. It had gotten to the point, Cameron said, that the inside of their home in Wilson was just as cold as the outside.

"It's been terrible," she said, guarding a stroller with baby Deena swaddled inside. "My sister's been trying to get us to come to Mississippi, but I have no way of getting down there."

Cameron was among the thousands of Met-Ed customers in the Easton area without electricity two days after the storm.

As of early this morning, the utilty was reporting 5,858 customers without power in Easton -- down from more than 7,400 Wednesday morning -- and another 1,516 in Wilson. 

Residents of Forks and Palmer townships are still struggling with power outages as well.

Among the Easton residents without power are the senior citizens in places like Harlan House and Walter House, Easton Housing Authority Director Gene Pambiachi told the Express-Times. 

He said it was unclear when Met-Ed would restore power to those buildings.

"Ninety-five percent of Met-Ed's customers are expected to be restored by this weekend, with the remainder restored early next week," the company said Wednesday in a statement on its website. 

That can't come soon enough for people like Melissa Brahm, another Wilson resident, whose power actually went out Sunday, before the height of the storm. On Wednesday, she took her children to the Salvation Army for a hot meal.

At home at night, they'll be bundled up, she said.

"We've got out the sleeping bags. Lots of blankets, flannels," said Brahm, who added she's never gone this long without electricity.

The Salvation Army was one of four daytime shelters in the city offering residents a place to keep warm. 

The storm made other impacts on the city. Lafayette College canceled classes for the rest of the week, and encouraged its students to go home. 

And the city's downtown saw heavier traffic than normal, thanks to closed roads and an influx of drivers seeking gas at the Third Street Exxon. Other nearby gas stations, such as the Turkey Hill near the I-78 exit, also saw long lines of cars.

At the Terra Cafe, South Side resident George Wharton said he was lucky enough not to lose power, and fortunate that the property damage he did experience -- a tree falling in his yard -- wasn't more serious.

He was trying to keep things in perspective.

"I saw a lot of people who were way worse off," he said, looking over newspaper photos of storm damage. "People lost their cars, their homes, their clothes. To be inconvenienced is not that bad."

Jasmine Mitchell, a Forks Township resident sitting nearby, had seen some of that damage in her neighborhood, describing what the hurricane had done to her neighbor's swingset.

"It looked like someone just picked it up, garbled it up, and tossed it back into the woods," she said.

Now, she and her daughter were headed to check on family in New Jersey, the scene of even worse damage. Phones were out there, so they were just going to drive, seeing if everyone was OK.