East Coast Cleaning Up After Being Rocked by Strong Winds

Workers cleared streets of trees and power lines today after windstorms left more than 200,000 East Coast homes and businesses without power, battered four parked jetliners in metropolitan New York and fanned a three-block fire in New Jersey.

Winds of 63 m.p.h. were blamed for the death of a Baltimore woman killed when a warehouse fell on her home. Snow from the same cold front was blamed for the deaths of two young men whose pickup slammed into a tractor-trailer in western Pennsylvania.

The fire early today in Newark, N.J., left at least 35 families in a poor area homeless, Mayor Sharpe James said. Gusts to 50 m.p.h. spread the blaze to more than a dozen houses and apartment buildings, but no injuries were reported.

“We expected it to be windy, but we didn’t expect it to be this strong,” said Clyde Dossett of the National Weather Service in Wilmington, Del., where the wind was clocked at 59 m.p.h.

Gusts to 64 m.p.h. lifted a parked Continental Airlines jetliner and dropped it on a baggage cart and fuel truck at Newark International Airport.

No passengers were on the Boeing 727, but a worker inside the craft’s baggage area suffered minor injuries, authorities said.

Three Pan Am planes parked outside a hangar at New York’s Kennedy International were damaged by 44 m.p.h. gusts, police said.

The wind blew a 747 into the hangar and pushed another 747 into a fence. Metal scaffolding around a third plane, an A-300 airbus, was blown into the aircraft’s skin.

“The storm came in fast and furious and ended almost as quickly,” Police Lt. Kevin Hassett said. The airport was shut for 45 minutes Monday night.