now that is down to less than 150,000. shepard, back to you. shepard: steve harrigan live tonight. thanks. the storm forced energy companies to shut down parts two of nuclear plants including indian point which is about 45 miles north of new york city. it also prompted safety officials to declare an alert at the nation s oldest nuclear plant. that s in oyster creek, new jersey. it was already out of service for refueling as it turns out. engineers apparently grew concerned last night as the water levels came up. and an alert means something has happened that could compromise the plant s safety. although its backup system still works. it does not require folks to evacuate their homes. certainly not. all across the northeast. people are dealing with lakes of water where their yards used to be. our viewers are sending photos of the widespread damage and we thank you. we will take a look at them on route to mr. bill o reilly live tonight and that s coming up. i gave birth to my daughter
the landing gear telling the plane it is on the ground not flying. turning off pressurization and the autopilot. if it thinks it s on the ground, it s going to want to pull the throttles all the way back. so there s no more thrust out of the engines. reporter: alaska air says a backup system immediately restored air pressure in the cabin. oxygen masks were never deployed. and the pilots took the flight controls. systems are not working properly you need to know how to manually fly the airplane and bring it back safely. reporter: and just like that, the pilots took control. flying the big jet in by hand, like it was a cessna. jim avila, abc news, washington. we turn to a developing story and the latest on a risky rescue mission at the bottom of the world. an american has been picked up from the mcmurdo station in antarctica, arriving in christchurch, new zealand.
air. the homeowners had no idea there was an underground spring on their property. it was fed by heavy rains. that s what caused all of that erosion. ooh. well, now it a consumer alert at ford s huge recall of nearly half a million sport utility vehicles. the automaker says gas pedals can stick and 485,000 escapes sold in the u.s. and mavericks sold in europe. the cars were from 2001 through 2004. the model years. ford says the cars may have faulty cruise control system linked to more than a dozen accidents and at least one fatality. a big story now for the twitter-verse. twitter is doing some damage control this morning after a system failure that lasted more than an hour yesterday. the company says the shutdown was not caused by a flood of tweets about the olympics in london. rather it was a double failure at its data center, the backup system also crashed.
reporter: it was supposed to knock out internet service to thousands. but the threat posed by the virus known as dnschanger turned out to be overblown. many people took precautions and steps ahead of time to make sure they weren t affected and that s what you see a lot of the internet service providers, verizon and comcast saying we were really prepped for this, we have known about this for months. reporter: the world discovered dnschanger last november when the fbi busted a ring of estonians whose software infected machines, rerouting them to fake sites. instead of going to your bank you go to a website they control and they can capture your password. reporter: according to norton anti-virus, there are believed to be fewer than 70,000 infected computers in this country and no more than 250,000 worldwide. the fbi had built a temporary backup system to help keep people online.
to testify soon. and that day has come. we ll tell you which airline will let you use a cell phone during your flight. dramatic new developments today in the battle between washington and wall street. an fbi source tells cnn the government is looking into the $2 billion trading loss by one of the nation s largest banks, jpmorgan chase. today bank ceo jamie dimon assured shareholders that jpmorgan chase is strong and can with stand the loss. he was speaking today in tampa and played down the sudden departure of the chief investment officer or cio ina drew. while we have taken loss of the cio, no clients were affected, no customers suffered as a result of our mistakes. the bottom line is that however unfortunate this incident is we want to do what we always do admit our mistakes, learn from them and fix them. i m confident when we are done here we ll with b a stronger confident. the shareholders voted to let him keep his job. they also voted to let him keep his $23 mi