Irene Crosses into Canada; Cleanup to Take Weeks

Hurricane Irene was downgraded to a post-tropical cyclone as it was heading toward Canada on Sunday night, but it had already killed more than two dozen people across the United States, The Christian Postreports. Preliminary estimates have the storm costing insurers $1.5 billion to $3 billion, with total damages, including uninsured losses, around $5 billion to $7 billion. Philip Bediant, a professor of civil engineering at Rice University in Houston, said that the recovery effort would take days, and in some cases weeks, as flooding from Irene’s torrential rains was still a threat to electrical infrastructure. “It could have been a lot worse in terms of storm surge, could have been worse in terms of the actual wind speeds,” he said. “It did not strengthen like they originally thought.”