It’s going to take a while. The MTA is saying this is the worst disaster to ever hit the subways. There’s water in all of the tunnels under the East River and they’ll have to be pumped and the electrical equipment will have to be fixed. Apparently the MTA says it’s not true that the system will be down for the rest of the week, but we’ll see. Most of the passenger tunnels are also down. I think the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel is totally flooded.
In my apartment we’re fine. Our power flickered a couple of times but didn’t go out. Downtown Manhattan is a complete mess and I think last night the water got as far as midtown. There was also some flooding to the west, closer to the Hudson. My parents on Long Island lost power but they didn’t get any flooding. Hurricane Irene knocked down the trees in front of their house last year, so there was no risk of that this time. They had no power for a week or a week and a half last year.
Went to bed early in anticipation of losing power, which apparently never happened. Woke up three hours later (around 10:30) and spent a couple hours listening to the shortwave. Spent a few minutes on Cleveland’s WTAM 1100; so many people went to Edgewater Park to watch Lake Erie that the reporter had trouble finding a place to park when he went to report on the crowd!
Also had WCBS 880 on around Midnight, they were reporting the evacuation of NYU Hosptial. I believe Bellevue was also evacuated.
Here, a few miles south of DC, someone had a chainsaw going earlier and there’s a smallish tree partially down across the street.
It’s working for me right now. However, the Gawker network of websites (Lifehacker, Jezebel, Deadspin, Gizmodo, io9, Kotaku, etc.) is out and has been since last night.
Can’t get 880 during the day so I started listening to WCBS on the Net. Queens fire spread to at least 100 homes and Palisades Hospital also evacuated. ConEd is reporting the largest weather-related outage in its history.
Checking in from New Brunswick. I’ve never seen wind damage like this in my life. Massive trees uprooted with root systems as big as small cars. Power lines down all over the neighborhood. So glad I drank through this. Don’t expect power any time soon. This may be my last post for a while
I spoke too soon. We have downed lines and there were transformers blowing all over the place. I haven’t heard from my SO, presumably the car was in good enough shape to drive to work this morning-I made sure to repark it well away from trees yesterday when I dropped him off to work.
Oh how awful! I grew up nearby so I know the neighborhood.
We were incredibly lucky here in northern NJ. The only thing out is the cable. My next door neighbor’s front yard tree was uprooted but that’s about it on my block. I have phone, lights and internet so I can even do my work at home job. But I have no idea when my husband can go back to work. He works in NYC.
They’re reporting 80% of all Long Islanders are without power.
Sump pump went out yesterday evening and we bailed for a couple of hours, then gave up. Woke up to find about an inch of water in the basement. Fortunately, before going to bed last night I reserved what must have been the last floor pump in stock anywhere and was able to pick it up this morning and it’s keeping up with the water so far.
The wind has died down and we are one of the few areas in our city that still has electricity, which is good because no electricity would mean no pump. No huge limbs down on our street but the nearest major road is closed due to a fallen tree. Kids are home from school and many businesses are closed.
That doesn’t sound so bad until you consider that we are over four hundred miles inland.
Dad just checked in from Forest Hills, Queens - they didn’t even lose power. Some wind, but no major flooding. All the same, I bet he’s sure glad he’s retired now instead of doing maintenence planning for the Transit Authority.
Christie gave an evacuation order, but the mayor opened up some ineffective shelters in the city. About 500 people needed to be rescued from those shelters because they were surrounded by water or lost power. That’s my understanding of the story. These guys also dislike each other personally, but the mayor sounds like an idiot here and I don’t think Christie is alone in saying he screwed up.
I was in Alabama visiting relatives when Sandy hit and am now stuck here indefinitely. If anyone can help me out and let me know anything they can about the Summit NJ or more specifically the New Providence area I would really appreciate it. I am having a hard time tracking down news about home.
I was watching part of the Today show earlier, and Matt Lauer interviewed the AC mayor, who wanted Lauer and Christie to point out where he’d told people to not evacuate, and said it was sad that the governor was “playing politics” at this time.
I’d have to see what their actual statements were, but it’s possible the mayor said “evacuate… but if you really can’t, we have shelters” and Christie would have wanted him to say “no really, get the hell out, shelters aren’t safe.”
