NYC faces transit nightmare, outages after Sandy
Updated at 4:23 p.m. ET
New York The nation's largest city began to pick up the pieces Tuesday after superstorm Sandy deluged lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, devastated the subway system and left hundreds of thousands without power.
Sandy's wrath was felt up and down the East Coast, causing dozens deaths before continuing its path inland with the potential to cause even more havoc.
At least 10 people in New York City died in the storm, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday.
Sandy washes tanker ship ashore on Staten Island, N.Y.
Bloomberg on Sandy: At least 10 deaths in NYC
Fire engulfs more than 50 homes as flooding slows crews
A man in Queens and a couple in Brooklyn were killed by falling trees. One woman may have died when she stepped in a puddle that hid an electrical line. Others either drowned or were found dead in a home or car. Bloomberg said at least one person drowned in a home.
"This was a devastating storm, maybe the worst that we have ever experienced," he said, offering no firm timetable on when power or subway service would be restored.
Scenes of the damage were everywhere. Between 80 and 100 flooded homes in Queens caught fire and were destroyed. A hospital removed patients on stretchers and 20 babies from neonatal intensive care, some on respirators operating on battery power.
Sidewalks, streets and subways usually bustling with crowds and traffic jams emptied for a time. And high above midtown, the broken boom of a crane continued to dangle precariously over a neighborhood.
"Oh, Jesus. Oh, no," said Faye Schwartz, 65, Tuesday morning as she surveyed the damage in her Brooklyn neighborhood, where cars were strewn like leaves, planters were deposited in intersections and green Dumpsters were tossed on their sides.
MTA officials told WCBS Monday that the process of pumping water out of the tunnels could take up to four days. Salt water could corrode the switches and signals in the system, which would force the MTA to replace hundreds of pieces of equipment before any service could be restored.
"We have no idea how long it's going to take," spokeswoman Marjorie Anders said.
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Officials began to assess the damage to the nation's largest subway system Tuesday. All 10 tunnels in lower Manhattan, which connect the borough to Brooklyn and parts of Queens were flooded in what MTA chairman Joe Lhota told WCBS-TV was the "most devastating" event in the history of the system.
On its website, MTA states: "In the period of a few hours, seven East River subway tubes, two Long Island Rail Road tubes linking Manhattan with Queens and two vehicular tunnels were inundated by a wall of water, along with one subway bridge, three subway yards and six bus depots."
Pumping was underway but workers ultimately will have to walk all the hundreds of miles of track to inspect it, she said, and it wasn't clear how long that would take. Trains had been moved to safety before the storm.
The breadth of the damage was "unimaginable," Lhota said. As officials assess the damage, Lhota said it's likely that the subway system would be brought back online in pieces, not altogether.
Additionally, Sandy forced the closure of all bridges and tunnels to the island of Manhattan for a time. On Tuesday afternoon, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that "five of the MTA's seven bridges, the Robert F. Kennedy, Verrazano-Narrows, Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck and Henry Hudson bridges, were fully inspected and reopened at noon. The two Rockaway bridges, Cross Bay Veterans Memorial and Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges bridges, and the Hugh L. Carey and Queens Midtown Tunnel remain closed."
At 5 p.m. Tuesday, partial bus service was expected to be restored in parts of the city.
The storm was once Hurricane Sandy but combined with two wintry systems to become a huge hybrid storm whose center smashed ashore late Monday in New Jersey. New York City was perfectly positioned to absorb the worst of its storm surge -- a record 13 feet.
By Monday evening, Manhattan's southern tip was flooded, with water lapping over the seawall in Battery Park City. Rescue workers floated bright orange rafts down flooded downtown streets, while police officers rolled slowly down the street with loudspeakers telling people to go home.
The surge was so powerful , in fact, that water from the Hudson River, on Manhattan's west coast, flooded the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, on the borough's eastern edge, and ended up inundating Brooklyn, Lohta said.
Superstorm's most dramatic images
"We knew that this was going to be a very dangerous storm, and the storm has met our expectations," Bloomberg said. "This is a once-in-a-long-time storm."
Bloomberg said it could be two or three days for power to be fully restored but offered no further specifics.
"This will be one for the record books," said John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at ConEdison. "This will be the largest storm-related outage in our history."
Shortly after the massive storm made landfall in southern New Jersey, Consolidated Edison cut power deliberately to about 6,500 customers in downtown Manhattan to avert further damage. Soon, huge swaths of the city went dark.
New York University's hospital lost backup power, Bloomberg said. Late Monday, an explosion at a substation at 14th Street and FDR Drive contributed to the outages. No one was injured, and ConEd did not know whether the explosion was caused by flooding or by flying debris.
The underground power lines that deliver electricity to much of New York City are much less vulnerable to outages than overhead lines because they aren't exposed to wind and falling trees or branches. But when damaged, they are harder to repair because the equipment is more difficult to access.
If substations are flooded while in operation, the equipment will fail and need to be replaced. If they are shut down in advance, workers can more quickly power up the machinery and restore service after floodwaters have receded.
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After two backup generators failed, New York University's Tisch Hospital began evacuating more than 200 patients to other facilities, including 20 babies from neonatal intensive care, some of them on respirators operating on battery power.
Without power, the hospital had no elevator service, meaning patients had to be carefully carried down staircases.
And stock trading will be closed in the U.S. for a second day Tuesday -- the first time the New York Stock Exchange will be closed for two consecutive days due to weather since 1888, when a blizzard struck the city.
In Queens, nearly 200 firefighters tried to contain an enormous blaze that consumed more than 80 homes in the Breezy Point neighborhood. They had to use a boat to make rescues and climbed an awning to reach about 25 trapped people, firefighters told WABC-TV.
The neighborhood sits on the Rockaway peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. Officials weren't immediately able to pin down the cause of the blaze.
WCBS reports nine people have been arrested for allegedly stealing from businesses near the Rockaways in Queens during and after Sandy.
Three people were arrested at a gas station, three at a Radio Shack, and two at a clothing store.
The rains and howling winds, some believed to reach more than 95 mph, left a crane hanging off a luxury high-rise in midtown Manhattan, causing the evacuation of hundreds from a posh hotel and other buildings. Inspectors were climbing 74 flights of stairs to examine the crane hanging from the $1.5 billion building.
Bloomberg said Tuesday that building inspectors had determined the crane was stable, but efforts to repair the mechanism would have to wait until the wind and weather clear further.
The facade of a four-story Manhattan building in the Chelsea neighborhood crumbled and collapsed suddenly, leaving the lights, couches, cabinets and desks inside visible from the street. No one was hurt, although some of the falling debris hit a car.
At a darkened luxury high-rise building called the William Beaver House in Lower Manhattan, resident manager John Sarich was sending up porters with flashlights up and down the 47 flights of stairs to check on residents.
He said most people stayed put despite calls to evacuate. One pregnant woman in the building started having contractions, and Sarich said that before the power went out, he nervously researched how to deliver a baby on the Internet.
"I said, `Oh boy, I'm in trouble,'" Sarich said. The woman managed to find a cab to take her to a hospital.
Uptown in Chelsea, the city's thriving gallery district was under waist-high water the night before.
Reggie Thomas, a maintenance supervisor at a prison located within striking distance of the overflowing Hudson River, emerged from an overnight shift there, a toothbrush in his front pocket, to find his 2011 Honda with its windows down and a foot of water inside. The windows automatically go down when the car is submerged to free drivers. It left his car with a foot of water inside, and unable to start.
"It's totaled," Thomas said, with a shrug. "You would have needed a boat last night."
In Schwartz's Brooklyn neighborhood of Red Hook, residents who ignored a mandatory evacuation order awoke to debris-strewn streets and a continued blackout. About 2 inches of mucky dirt and leaves covered streets crisscrossed by downed power lines after water sloshed 12 blocks inland.
The doors of the Fairway grocery store were blown out. Several cars left in the parking lot were shifted by flood waters overnight and were left crammed door to door.
Schwartz and her husband rode out the storm on the third floor of the residences above the Fairway and said white-capped flood waters reached at least 3 feet around the building.
"It was scary how fast the water came up," she said.
On Tuesday, the New York Stock Exchange was again — the first time it's been closed for two consecutive days due to weather since 1888, when a blizzard struck the city. But the exchange will be opened Wednesday, officials said.
About 2.2 million customers went without electricity statewide, and an estimated 1 million lost power in New York City and Long Island, where floodwaters swamped cars, downed trees and put neighborhoods under water.
On coastal Long Island, floodwaters swamped cars, downed trees and put neighborhoods under water as beachfronts and fishing villages bore the brunt of the storm. A police car was lost rescuing 14 people from the popular resort Fire Island.
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You really need to get on some recruiting websites and find a job!! I was right - you really do need to get a life, or some friends. Maybe that way you wouldn't spend your whole day on this website sounding like an ignorant and OBNOXIOUS moron. Oh wait, but let me guess...Americans are the obnoxious ones right?? GET A JOB! FIND SOME HOBBIES! STOP OBSESSING OVER AMERICA!! You live in a country that no one talks about because no one cares! You are jealous and obsessive and I would be too - I love this country. I have been all over Canada and it isn't that great, eh?
Maybe the NHL lockout will end and that will give Americans a reason to talk about Canada again. Now hop to it - start sending that resume! Today may be your lucky day:)
No one talks about Canada because we aren't doing stupid things. We don't have other countries hating us. We don't have terrorists after us. We aren't IGNORANT. When someone graduates in our schools, they know how to read and write. We don't have every Tom, ******** and Harry running around shooting each other.
We are rated as the #1 country for women, and the #1 country for children to grow up in. We have healthcare for everyone, and an excellent educational system. That's kinda boring stuff compared to all your drama. You have people dying everyday from lack of healthcare. Kids dying on the streets from gunshot wounds. Hell, everyone is dying on the streets from gunshot wounds. You have kids being tortured, and held in cages and closets for years. Yeah, like who isn't going to be more interested in seeing stuff like that, huh?
As far as the hockey goes, hopefully the lockout will never end.
As for myself, I don't need a job, but I'm thinking you do.
"GODBLESSAMERICA"
I don't know whether you have noticed this or not, but I don't think God is blessing America.
Americans, wake up if you think what Erasmus111 is saying is all lies. I am scared of what America has become. It will get better. I truly believe that, but not with Romney. This is a man who changes his mind like he changes his underwear. We are moving in a slow recovery, but we are moving.
It was on the news how other Countries view America. More Countries presidents have respect for Obama then Romney. Another war will not help the economy; it will destroy it. It will be Depression 2 for the USA.
Erasmuss111 got this right {George, your country is almost a third world country because of Bush. It is no longer a great country because of Bush. It became a cesspool because of Bush.
What we need to do as Americans is stand together and get America back on track. OUR TWO PARTIES NEED TO COME TOGETHER AS ONE.
erasmus111, so no matter how many stories you tell me, YOU ARE WRONG about life here in America.....I LIVE HERE, I KNOW !!!!!......it is NOTHING like what CBS portrays, NOTHING like what YOU portray it as.....not even close.
I am not wrong about life in America. You live in your own little corner of America and from the looks of it that is all you know....your little corner.
You are like millions of others. You live in denial.
One thing I know is, a lot of Americans don't know squat about their own country, or any other country. In school you don't learn about any other countries. And a lot of people can't even read or spell when they GRADUATE. They can't even find their own country on a freakin' map! Now, if you keep Obama, that will change.
All the gun lovers don't even know the laws of your country. I have to tell them! I will show them proof of things and they will still deny it.
There are lots of ignorant idiots in America, and the vast majority are Republicans. YOU.
I think I'm done with this sillyness, retarded cannucks trying to tell me what my country is like.
Until then, shut the hell up.
Oh, and you might want to clean up your spelling and learn how to talk properly before you send them a letter.
Wouldn't you think people would get all the vehicles out of town (over the weekend) with lots of time to react. It would have made sense to organize employees to get the vehicles inland somewhere. All this could have been done in plenty of time. I know it's about logistics but it's not like it was a last minute thing to do.
so, maybe it's a case, where you don't understand what large industrialized cities are like, how they operate....how impossible it would be to evacuate nineteen million people.
You desperately need to get a life! I feel so bad for you. It is quite obvious how bitter, miserable, and ignorant you are. My guess is you are unemployed because no one with a job could spend all day writing ignorant comments in a news forum. I can say with certainty that you are cold and alone living in a country where no one likes you. Sorry that you have such a problem with American politics and Americans in general - but no one wants to hear your ignorant, idiotic, and racist rants. Hopefully you will find a job soon and make some friends. And lets face it, based on how much interest you have in the U.S...my guess is you would LOVE to call yourself an American. Canada is a pretty sweet country - you guys have hockey, right???? Hahaha.
Actually, bonehead, I'm not on here all day, everyday.
And I'm not bitter at all. I just choose to live in REALITY.
Who wouldn't have a problem with your politics? It's disgraceful. Your political system sucks, big time. It's corrupt. It takes two years for an election. That's atrocious. Our elections take one month. There is no need for it to take any longer than that. The money that is spent on your elections is CRIMINAL. Millions of dollars down the drain.
And, there ain't no one here wanting to be an American. MAYBE at one time there may have been some, but America has gone down the tubes. No one in their right mind would want to be an American right now. Only the extremely DESPERATE. Your healthcare, alone, is reason enough to not want to be an American.
Your only hope is Obama. Give him enough time and he may be able to restore America to what it once was. That's if he doesn't have any more interference from the Republicans.
Just because he is Canadian and can see thru the transparency of the lies being told by the Republicans year in and year out doesn't make him idiotic, and apparantly makes him a lot less ignorant than many Americans.
And, by the way, before passing similar judgement on me, I happen to be a white, male, middle-class registered independent, American citizen, and proud of it.
And, by the way, rather than putting someone down for their comments, perhaps providing some kind of intelligent response that supports your point of view would be a wiser approach?
Put a cork in it. Why don't you just go "do" what you "do" best, Debbie. Perhaps in Dallas.
And George, what has happened in Florida, kinda proves my point. The Republicans aren't trustworthy and are corrupt
_________________
What the hell are you talking about ? and please don't tell me one guy who did something now equates to the whole party being corrupt.....when Democrats won the trophy for the most record corruptions.
You're view of America is so far from actual reality.
No, it is not. I see the reality. You are living in denial. La La Land. You have major corruption, major racism, and major HATRED going on in your country. And I see the majority of it coming from the Republicans.
And the bullcrap going on in Florida isn't from just one guy! The same thing happened in the last election. Republicans were sending letters to people telling them they couldn't vote for one reason or another. And how the districts had changed. When you are doing stuff like that, that is EVIL and CORRUPT.
Has Romney come forward condemning it? Did Romney come forward condemning the guy that said "Rape is God's will"??? There was something else someone said, and he didn't come forward condemning it either. I can't remember exactly what it was at the moment. That's probably because the crap is NEVER ENDING!
We were sitting down for dinner one night and he started blathering on about the "Mexicans", and how he hated them and wouldn't enter a room with one in it. My mom told him that if he was going to talk like that he could leave. She didn't want him in her house.
Sadly, he is just one of MILLIONS of ignorant Republicans in your country.
The fact that there are still "black" neighborhoods, and segregated schools, proves you are still living in the dark ages.