10/29/12 NYT James Barron
Hurricane Sandy battered the mid-Atlantic region on Monday, its powerful gusts and storm surges causing once-in-a-generation flooding in coastal communities, knocking down trees and power lines and leaving more than five million people — including a large swath of Manhattan — in the rain-soaked dark. At least seven deaths in the New York region were tied to the storm.
The mammoth and merciless storm made landfall near Atlantic City around 8 p.m., with maximum sustained winds of about 80 miles per hour, the National Hurricane Center said. That was shortly after the center had reclassified the storm as a post-tropical cyclone, a scientific renaming that had no bearing on the powerful winds, driving rains and life-threatening storm surge expected to accompany its push onto land.
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| Floodwaters rushed into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. |
The storm had unexpectedly picked up speed as it roared over the Atlantic Ocean on a slate-gray day and went on to paralyze life for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states, with extensive evacuations that turned shorefront neighborhoods into ghost towns.
In Manhattan, NYU Langone Medical Center’s backup power system failed Monday evening, forcing the evacuation of patients to other facilities.
Earlier, a construction crane atop one of the tallest buildings in the city came loose and dangled 80 stories over West 57th Street, across the street from Carnegie Hall.
Soon power was going out and water was rushing in. Waves topped the sea wall in the financial district in Manhattan, sending cars floating downstream. In Lower Manhattan, the South Street Seaport and much of Battery Park City was flooded. Photos revealed portions of Alphabet City under water, as well as portions of the West Side Highway, the Battery Tunnel, and streets as far north as 33rd Street.
Consolidated Edison said that as of 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, 634,000 customers in New York City and Westchester County were without power. Con Edison, fearing damage to its electrical equipment, shut down power pre-emptively in sections of Lower Manhattan on Monday evening, and then, at 8:30 p.m., an unplanned failure, probably caused by flooding in substations, knocked out power to most of Manhattan below Midtown, about 250,000 customers. Later, an explosion at a Con Ed substation on East 14th Street knocked out power to another 250,000 customers. At about 8:30 p.m., electricity suddenly stopped flowing to apartments and office buildings from East 39th Street all the way down to the southern tip of the island.
The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night,” said Joseph J. Lhota, the authority’s chairman, in a statement.
More than 140 firefighters were battling a four-alarm fire that broke out just after 11 p.m. on Monday in Breezy Point, Queens, a small beach community in the Rockaways that has experienced severe flooding from the storm.
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| Rockaway Beach Boulevard as Hurricane Sandy begins to affect the area |