Airlines haltingly began to resume some flights Sunday in the northeastern United States after the destruction left by Hurricane Irene, but travelers still faced widespread cancellations into Monday and backups well into next week.
U.S. carriers scrubbed more than 11,000 flights because of Irene. Almost all flights were canceled in Philadelphia and Boston on Sunday, while the three big airports in the New York area -- John F. Kennedy, Newark and La Guardia -- remained closed and looked unlikely to reopen until Monday afternoon at the earliest, pending inspection of the airport facilities and resumption of bus and train service.
In Washington, both Dulles International and Reagan National reopened with no major damage reported. "There are still many cancellations and delays," said Courtney Mickalonis, a spokeswoman for the authority. "It is going to continue for another day or two. We recommend that people check with their airlines."
Delta Airlines said that as Irene continued to dissipate, airline operations "have begun to resume at some airports." The company said that Delta will cancel about 1,100 flights of the 5,500 it had scheduled on Sunday. It estimated that it will have canceled 2,200 out of 16,500 flights between Saturday and Monday because of the storm. It did not have a breakdown for Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
IRENE'S ECONOMIC TOLL EXPECTED TO HIT $7B
Damage from Irene appears to be less than feared, a bit of reassuring news for a fragile economy.
Insured damage from Irene will range between $2 billion and $3 billion, and the total losses will likely be about $7 billion, said preliminary estimates by Kinetic Analysis Corp., a consulting firm. Both figures are less than had been expected -- some feared the damage could run as high as $35 billion with a direct hit on New York City -- and likely mean little damage to the nation's $14 trillion economy.
"Irene left several places with black eyes, but it doesn't seem to have delivered an economic knockout," said Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody's Analytics.
The long-term costs of Irene will grow as storm-ravaged areas deal with lost business, insurance claims, dislocated workers and transportation disruptions -- costs that will take months to fully calculate. Still, rebuilding and repairing the damage from the storm should be enough to boost economic output in the final three months of this year and perhaps beyond, economists said. "This region is very highly insured, so a lot of money will start pouring in, and that should re-employ a lot of construction workers who are now out of work," said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's.
