East Coast plagued by more thunderstorms

RICHMOND, Va. -- East Coast residents recovering from Isabel are cleaning up again after new storms, including tornadoes, brought down more trees, flooded already saturated areas and knocked out power, forcing some people to empty refrigerators they'd just refilled.\nStorms battered the Richmond area with wind up to 100 mph Tuesday morning, and the National Weather Service said an unknown number of tornadoes touched down six times in the area. At one site, about 40 miles west of the city, a mobile home was shredded and tossed about 25 feet.\n"Isabel was gravy compared to this guy," Richmond resident James Whitaker said. "We went down and got in the closet downstairs and stayed in it."\nNo serious injuries were reported from the Virginia twisters, part of a weather system that also caused damage in Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.\nIsabel has been blamed for at least 40 deaths, 25 of them in Virginia.\nTwo tornadoes accompanied by drenching rain damaged homes and knocked down trees in New Jersey, which had been on the fringes of the effects of Isabel. More than 50,000 customers were blacked out Tuesday.\n"You hear it, and don't know when it's going to stop," Beth Hageman said of a twister in Delaware Township, N.J. "I felt like I was going to be in Oz."\nThe latest storms also pounded the Washington, D.C., area with heavy rain, dropping 6 1/2 inches in Leesburg, about 40 miles west of the capital. The deluge snarled traffic and flooded homes.\nNorthwest of Washington, up to 4 inches of rain fell at Frederick, Md., as the storms flooded roads that were submerged a week earlier by Isabel. The violent weather in Maryland also added 50,000 customers without power to the more than 131,000 still in the dark since Isabel, utility officials said.\nAt least 40,000 customers lost power in Virginia, some for the second time since Isabel struck last week. As of Wednesday morning, nearly 500,000 homes and businesses in Virginia and North Carolina still were without electricity.\n"I just restocked my refrigerator last night. This is just so unreal," said Renee Knight, who lost power in a Richmond neighborhood that also lost power during Isabel for about 20 hours.\nVirginia's main utility, Dominion Virginia Power, said Tuesday that 415 miles of power lines will have to be rebuilt in some of the areas hardest hit by the hurricane. About 1.8 million Dominion customers in Virginia and North Carolina lost power during Isabel.\nTuesday's storms also blacked out about 34,000 customers in Pennsylvania, and the National Weather Service confirmed Wednesday that a tornado touched down in the Philadelphia suburb of Narberth, where falling trees damaged the roofs of several homes. Only about 2,500 still had no power Wednesday.\nNo new damage was reported in North Carolina from the most recent storms.\nPresident Bush authorized disaster assistance Wednesday for West Virginia for recovery efforts from Hurricane Isabel.\nWeary of living without electricity for five days, Joy Melvin had taken her 20-month-old daughter and moved in with a friend, Keisha Gilchrist, in a section of Richmond that was little affected by the hurricane.\nTuesday, a tree slammed onto the roof above the bedroom where they slept.\n"We ran from upstairs," Melvin said. "Thank God for her (Gilchrist) yelling"