Frank'nStorm

Lookout when opposites clash.

What will be the fallout?

It could be like WW3 over there.

Deadly Hurricane Sandy to become 'Frankenstorm'

This adds to the toll it took while battering Jamaica, one death, and Haiti, nine fatalities.

The unusual mix of hurricane and winter storm is expected to hit New York City and New Jersey next week when it could be at its most fierce.

The Cuban death toll includes a 4-month-old boy who was crushed when his Santiago province home collapsed. Eight others were killed in the same province while two were killed in Guantanamo province, near Guantanamo Bay.

US Government forecasters upped the odds of a major weather mess, now saying there's a 90 per cent chance that the East will get steady gale-force winds, heavy rain, flooding and maybe snow starting on Sunday and stretching past Halloween on Wednesday.

Meteorologists say it is likely to cause $1 billion in damages.

The storm is a combination of Hurricane Sandy, now in the Caribbean, an early winter storm in the West, and a blast of arctic air from the North. They're predicted to collide and park over the country's most populous coastal corridor and reach as far inland as Ohio.

The hurricane part of the storm is likely to come ashore somewhere in New Jersey on Tuesday morning, said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecaster Jim Cisco.

But this is a storm that will affect a far wider area, so people all along the East have to be wary, Mr Cisco said.

Coastal areas from Florida to Maine will feel some effects, mostly from the hurricane part, he said, and the other parts of the storm will reach inland from North Carolina northward.

Once the hurricane part of the storm hits, "it will get broader. It won't be as intense, but its effects will be spread over a very large area," the National Hurricane Center's chief hurricane specialist, James Franklin, said Thursday.

The US-based National Hurricane Centre said the storm was packing winds of up to 165km/h as it moved north, near the top of the category two range on the five-rung Saffir-Simpson wind scale.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/world/hurricane-sandy-kills-2-in-haiti-heads-to-bahamas/story-fnddckzi-1226503528157