Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers will wake up today waterlogged, stranded and without power, with relief still days away.
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Flood,
fire, electrical explosions and fierce winds from Hurricane Sandy have
devastated the massive and complex infrastructure that powers this city
of 8 million people and the surrounding region. Swathes of the city are
darkened by power failures; subway, rail and car tunnels are flooded
with corrosive saltwater; commuter rail lines lack electricity; and
runways at LaGuardia Airport are submerged.
Officials said the
damage is of historic proportions and predict it will be four or five
days before some electrical power is restored to 750,000 people in the
city and before the subway system, which carries 5 million riders daily,
can reopen.
"This has been a devastating storm - maybe the worst we have ever experienced," Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday.
While
previous natural disasters - such as the Joplin, Mo., tornado in 2011
or Homestead, Fla.'s Hurricane Andrew in 1992 - have virtually erased
entire communities, New York and the metro area around it still stand:
staggered and bruised, but not beaten.
Yet the size and density of
the region's population and New York's position as a hub of commerce,
transit and culture means that a disaster like Sandy upends millions of
lives for an uncomfortably long time. But well beyond the immediate
disaster area, the impact of this massive storm system cascades from
Manhattan to San Francisco, London to Frankfurt, Beijing and beyond as
disrupted flights and shuttered financial markets reverberate globally.
Airlines
canceled more than 16,000 flights from Sunday through today.
Three-dozen airports along the East Coast all but shut down on Monday as
Sandy made landfall. Resumption of all regular flights is expected to
take a week because many jets were moved away from the New York City
area and must be returned with their crews to resume work.
'We needed to get out'
On
Tuesday afternoon, Pierre-Yves Debay rushed across a pedestrian bridge
over West Street, near the 9/11 Memorial in Lower Manhattan. He was
carrying his 23-month-old son and lugging a backpack as he made his way
to the apartment of a friend.
"Over there, it's bad," he said,
gesturing toward Battery Park City, his waterfront neighborhood where a
13-foot tide covered the streets Monday night, knocking out power and
water. "They told us we wouldn't get it until Friday," said Debay, 37, a
financial analyst. "I just figured we needed to get out."
More
than 6,000 people stayed in city-run shelters Monday night, officials
said. Daphne Hart, a spokeswoman for the American Red Cross, said the
agency sheltered more than 11,000 people in 258 shelters across 16
states Monday night. "People took the storm seriously, and they
evacuated, which was a good thing."
Hundreds of hospital patients had to be evacuated on short notice
when backup generators failed at one of Manhattan's major hospitals.
Officials are still sorting out what caused the failure of the backup
power at NYU Langone Medical Center, but the generator might have been
located in the basement and was stalled by rising waters. "Things went
downhill very, very rapidly and very unexpectedly," Andrew Brotman,
senior vice president and vice dean for clinical affairs and strategy of
NYU, told CNN. "The flooding was just unprecedented."
When the
elevators shut down, hospital staff were forced to carry 260 patients
down flights of stairs, according to the Associated Press
A
diesel-powered commuter train, trying to clear suburban tracks, was
halted in Ossining, N.Y., by a 40-foot boat flung across the tracks by
the storm. In the tunnel connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn, floodwater
sloshed 14 feet deep Tuesday afternoon.
In a city where school
closings are rare, schools are closed for a third day in a row - but so
are city parks, because of danger from falling trees. The city hasn't
announced plans for the rest of the week.
And Halloween
celebrations are being scrambled: The 39-year-old parade in Greenwich
Village will be rescheduled, Bloomberg said, probably next week.
After all this, 'thankful'
Customers
in areas with overhead power lines will probably face longer waits as
utility and emergency crews work to remove downed trees and branches,
the Con Ed, the utility that services New York City, said.
A
raging fire consumed at least 80 homes in Breezy Point, a barrier island
neighborhood in Queens. Firefighters waded through chest-high water to
get to the blaze and residents who had fled were rescued by boat from
the second story of a local club. Because Breezy Point was an evacuation
zone, its volunteer companies had moved their firetrucks inland for
safety. Volunteer firefighter John Nies said the volunteers who'd had
stayed in town tried to pump water from the ocean, but lines quickly
became clogged. "With the wind whipping like that, we never had a
chance," he said.
"We all know each other, and we're all
devastated. But we're so thankful that this time no one was killed,"
said Marilyn Coady, a resident for 46 years who lives near the six-block
area that was destroyed.
The storm caused 10 deaths in the city,
Bloomberg said, including people killed by falling trees. They included
two who drowned in a home and one who was in bed when a tree fell on an
apartment. A 23-year-old woman died by stepping into a puddle near a
live electrical wire. A man and a woman were crushed by a falling tree.
An off-duty officer on Staten Island who ushered his relatives to the
attic of his home apparently became trapped in the basement
New
York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the power restoration would be complicated
because states normally lend utility crews to each other after
emergencies. But Sandy impacted most states along the East Coast. As a
result, Cuomo said, New York is trying to pull in utility crews from as
far away as Texas and California.
A city on the go stands still
A city whose pulse races with subways and taxis suddenly found itself with nowhere to go - and no way to get there.
Many
residents couldn't get to work; some couldn't get home. In the Brooklyn
neighborhood of Prospect Park, grocery store manager Adam Moy had been
up 23 hours, unable to get home to Staten Island on Monday during the
height of the storm.
"I'm pretty tired," he said. Customers Andres
Vera Martinez, his wife Na Liu and their daughter, Mei Lan, were
shopping because she couldn't get to her job on Coney Island, and
Martinez said he had been told that the art studio in Gowanus where he
works is flooded.
The ground was unusually dry around the Battery
Park City housing development, surrounded by water. Though residents had
been told to evacuate, many did not. One building did lose power, and
residents sat in a lobby, charging cellphones and iPods.
Allison
Chambers, a 43-year-old resident who works in real estate, said riding
out the storm was not that bad because someone on her floor was having a
hurricane party anyway. When the lights went out, everyone on the floor
opened their doors and people moved in and out of each others'
apartments, talking and laughing.
"It was fun," said Chambers, as she charged her phone and iPod. "I got to know all the neighbors."
After
24 hours of being holed up against Sandy in their low-lying Manhattan
neighborhood, the Napolitano family was doing pretty well on Catherine
Street Monday night. They had ignored an evacuation order. The streets
between them and the East River were flooded and everything had gone
dark, but Linda Napolitano had made a pot roast and vegetables for
dinner before the power went out, so everyone was well-fed, if bored.
John, Linda's son, was telling her grandson James, age 8, ghost stories
with a flashlight to keep him amused. Then came a knock on the door. A
New York City fireman told them to get out of the building - now -
because of a gas leak.
That was too much for James. "Immediately
my 8-year-old said, 'We're going to blow up,' and started crying," John
said Tuesday. The family waded across the street to a neighbor's
building and an hour later were allowed to go home - which meant
climbing 12 flights of stairs.
For tourists, a different NYC
The
power failure that darkened southern Manhattan created a line of
demarcation between neighborhoods where life goes on much as usual and
where the disruption was clear and painful.
Although fewer
vehicles were on city streets, driving in Lower Manhattan seemed nearly
as adventurous as on a normal workday. Along with edging around downed
trees, branches and other debris, drivers had to brake at nearly every
intersection because traffic and walk signals were inactive from lack of
power. The demarcation line on the East Side was E. 40th Street.
To
the south along Third Avenue Tuesday, crowds of pedestrians and drivers
jockeyed to make their way across signal-less intersections past
darkened delicatessens, dry cleaners, restaurants and other shops.
"Closed for Doomstorm," read the sign in the doorway of a Third Avenue coffee shop.
Even
portions of Manhattan spared wind and water damage felt the fallout.
The shopping meccas of Rockefeller Center and Fifth Avenue in Midtown
were full of tourists - with nowhere to go.
Saks Fifth Avenue
department store had all of its windows boarded up, and there were
sandbags inside the doors of Armani Exchange and Juicy Couture. The
popular destinations of the Museum of Modern Art, Top of the Rock at
Rockefeller Center and Radio City Music Hall were closed, and the famed
ice-skating rink was empty. St. Patrick's Cathedral was open, and
offered refuge from the spitting rain and chill. Many of the tourists
were groups of students from Europe.
Said Huw Griffiths, a TV
executive from western Wales who was leading 104 high school students on
a week-long visit to America that had been two years in the planning:
"The kids desperately wanted to shop, but with everything closed, this
is another blow for them. ... they had hoped to wear their posh clothes
tonight to the theater." But it too, was canceled.
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