Gov. Christie gives Sunday evening press conference urging residents of the Garden State to heed advice of officials and stay at home Monday unless they have already evacuated.
ATLANTIC CITY, NEW JERSEY — Emergency officials, local leaders and President Obama are urging people in Sandy's path to take the potentially history-making hurricane seriously and heed the advice of local emergency services including requests to evacuate.
The Atlantic County Office of Emergency Preparedness has issued a countywide travel ban, effective at midnight, Oct. 28.
"The travel ban restricts travel on all county and municipal roadways. Only vehicles transporting essential personnel or those who provide essential public services including police, fire, EMS and authorized emergency management personnel will be permitted on roadways until this ban is lifted," states a release sent to the media from the county.
The county has also issued a curfew, effective 6pm Sunday this evening through 6am on Monday, Oct. 29 for the barrier islands. This includes the towns of Brigantine, Atlantic City, Ventnor, Margate and Longport, which were ordered evacuated by 4pm Sunday.
The county adds the following emergency information:
"Residents who experience power outages should report them to Atlantic City Electric at 1-800-833-7476. Residents in need of assistance should first call their local office of emergency preparedness. Contacts numbers are available at ReadyAtlantic.org and in the Verizon phone book."
NJ211.org has information regarding shelter availability for evacuees.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, at a Sunday evening press briefing (watch below), urged residents who have not evacuated to hunker down and stay at home and keep off the roads.
"By tomorrow morning we are not going to want people going out on the roads," said Christie, urging New Jersey residents to make all final preparations for Sandy's impending touch down in the state early Monday morning."
"Tomorrow, the weather is going to get pretty ugly here," said Christie," and we want everybody to stay off the roads. I can't emphasize this enough."
Significant flooding, power outages and heavy winds are predicted for parts of New Jersey over a long period of time, making Sandy a unique storm stretching over a wide swath of the U.S. East Coast and moving slowly.
"Stay home and stay safe over that period of time," Christie urged. Roads and bridges will be closed on Monday on a case by case basis.
"Stay home; be smart," Christie said.
Christie added that the ever-changing forecast for Sandy has changed slightly with a greater chance of the hurricane making landfall in the Atlantic City region around 2am Tuesday morning. He expects the forecasts to change again.
Just after 9pm Sunday night, Reuters reported that:
Hurricane Sandy, which could become the largest storm ever to hit the United States, is set to bring much of the East Coast, including New York and Washington, to a virtual standstill in the next few days with battering winds, flooding and the risk of widespread power outages.
About 50 million people are in the path of the massive storm, which has already killed 66 people in the Caribbean and is expected to hit the U.S. Eastern Seaboard on Tuesday morning.
While the storm does not pack the punch of Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans in 2005, forecasters said it could be the largest in size when it strikes land. At the moment, Sandy's winds stretched some 520 miles and churned up 12-foot (3.6-meter) seas spanning more than 1,000 miles, meteorologists said.
New York and other cities and towns closed their transit systems and schools and ordered residents of low-lying areas to evacuate before a storm surge that could reach as high as 11 feet.
See Sandy storm tracker and forecast maps
Are you safe? Are you on the barrier islands?
"I could almost guarantee that the ones who wanted the mayors to let them return home would also be the ones to protest if they had been put in danger by returning too soon. "
Obama: "I want to thank all the first responders who have been involved in this process -- the linesmen, the firefighters, the folks who were in here shuttling out people who were supposed to 'get the hell out' and didn’t."
Obama: "You had a 15-year-old young man whose mother was disabled, and he was making sure that she was okay, and taking on extraordinary responsibilities for himself but also for his mom."
The latest Sandy storm coverage for the Atlantic City, New Jersey area.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie says he is trying to mitigate any damages in the state due to Hurricane Sandy, which has been blamed for the deaths of at least 58 people in the Caribbean as of Sunday afternoon.
According to the report, "Each New Jersey power company gave out a slightly different power outage estimate, but the longest outages during Hurricane Irene were seven or eight days, said Greg Reinerk, a spokesman for the state Board of Public Utilities
Atlantic County under state of emergency effective 6am, Oct. 27. Residents urged to relocate.
The storm, which has killed several dozen people in the Caribbean, is expected to be a "storm of historic proportions" for the Mid-Atlantic region, including the New Jersey shore, New York City, Delaware, Pennsylvania and possibly Ohio.
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