Hurricane Sandy has so far cost Mercer County close to $3 million in cleanup costs, a figure almost guaranteed to continue rising.

Dean Raymond, the director of Mercer County’s Office of Emergency Management, compiled the first figures reported by the municipalities Wednesday, a total of $2.8 million. They come from equipment, debris removal costs and employee overtime.

“I honestly don’t think it would be fair to say one municipality was hit harder than any other,” Raymond said. “To us it looks really widespread.”

The storm, which caused billions in damages and dozens of deaths in its trek up the east coast, flooded wide swaths of coastal areas in New Jersey and New York. The AP estimated costs from the storm could climb to more than $50 billion, with $10 billion in property damage alone.

Raymond emphasized that the county’s estimates will almost certainly be higher than Wednesday’s number; they don’t include all work done before Wednesday and none done later Wednesday or Thursday. The county put together the estimate preliminarily in order to be designated a disaster area by the Federal Emergency Management Agency to receive reimbursement for part of those expenses.

The highest cost estimate so far came from Princeton, where the borough and township combined their emergency management offices in the wake of the storm. Raymond said their preliminary estimate came to more than $400,000.

He said the municipalities varied in how much they reported, but all had incurred at least $100,000 so far in cleaning up from the storm. Trenton reported more than $250,000 in costs from the storm.

Qareeb Bashir, the city’s fire director and running the city’s Office of Emergency Management, said it did not include damage to city property from the storm, which would be factored in later.

“I know there are a lot of people who are affected,” he said. “We’re working feverishly to get things back to normal.”

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