MIAMI: After leaving 44 dead in the Caribbean, Hurricane Sandy inched toward the US East Coast on Saturday, threatening as much as a third of the United States with what has been dubbed a powerful “Frankenstorm.”

Forecasters predicted the storm could collide early next week with a seasonal “nor’easter” weather system that would super-charge it while dragging it west onto land and hitting states like Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts and even inland Ohio.

Before then, Sandy will amble up the coast as a huge, slow-moving system, while the eastern United States braces for huge tidal surges, power outages, inland flooding and even heavy snowfall on high ground far from the coast.

As emergency response teams and frightened families stocked up on essential supplies, meteorologists said that Sandy could affect as much as a third of the country, from the Carolinas up to New England and as far inland as Ohio.

Meteorologists have nicknamed the unusual confluence of weather patterns a “Frankenstorm” because it will hit right before Halloween on October 31 and is composed of parts from different sources, as was Fran-kenstein’s Monster.

The sprawling US Navy base in Norfolk, Virginia said that it was sending an entire fleet of ships out to sea to get out of the way of the storm.

Further north, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City said that the city was ready for anything Sandy could throw at it, and cautioned against panic.

Authorities in the states of Maryland, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, the US capital Washington and a coastal county in North Carolina declared a state of emergency, directing officials to speed up storm preparations.

One quirk of Sandy is that whereas most hurricanes tend to drift east after making landfall, this one could head inland because of a separate weather system high up in the atmosphere and far north, over southeast Canada.

Louis Uccellini, director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, said that the danger of coastal flooding was higher because Sandy would strike during a full moon, when tides are already at their highest.

Sandy could last through several tidal cycles and cause repeated flooding.

On Saturday, Sandy was about 630 kilometers south-southeast of Charleston, South Carolina, packing maximum sustained winds of 120 kilometers per hour and moving north at 11kph.

In some areas of the Bahamas and then later in Florida and elsewhere in the United States, flood waters could reach one to 1.5 meters in depth if the peak surge coincides with high tide.

The Caribbean island chain reported power and phone lines downed, tourists stranded and trees uprooted. Schools, government offices, airports and bridges were to remain closed on Friday.

Sandy earlier claimed 11 lives in eastern Cuba, including several who died in the rubble of buildings that collapsed in the fury of the massive storm.

The hurricane damaged hundreds of homes, flooding crops and downing trees, according to media reports.

On Wednesday, Sandy unleashed its wrath on Jamaica, where one person died, and on Haiti, where 29 people died. Two people were reported dead in the Dominican Republic and one in the Bahamas.