Homeless in Arizona

Hey, I don't know if the warning is a bunch of BS or not! I'm not a meteorologist!

But I do know that government bureaucrats who make these predictions have a tendency to predict disasters because it justifies their jobs.

And of course when the disaster never happens they always say "better safe then sorry".

And of course the other group to blame these bogus weather warning on is the media.

The newspapers love the huge dangerous warning because they sell papers.

Same goes for the TV stations. Really scary threats on the 10 o'clock news increase ratings and advertizing profits.

Source

East Coast Prepares for Storm’s Arrival

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Published: October 28, 2012

As the National Hurricane Center warned on Sunday of a “life-threatening storm surge” that could cause record-breaking coastal flooding, tens of millions of residents from Delaware to southern New England braced for the onslaught of Hurricane Sandy. The authorities across the region ordered the evacuation of many low-lying areas, including parts of New York City, and the shutdown of subway, bus and railroad services in New York and New Jersey.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg urged residents in low-lying areas to be out by 7 p.m., the same time that transit service would be suspended.

“We’re going to have a lot of impact, starting with the storm surge,” said Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Think, ‘Big.’ ”

Though the hurricane is not expected to make landfall until sometime late Monday, coastal regions will be hit by gale-force winds, heavy rain and possible flooding as early as Sunday, said Rick Knabb, the director of the National Hurricane Center. Tropical storm conditions were being felt in parts of North Carolina on Sunday, though the storm was 250 miles off the coast.

“Sandy is a large hurricane, and large systems pose multiple hazards for more people than smaller systems of comparable intensity,” Dr. Knabb said.

Forecasters warned that it could ravage areas far beyond the projected trajectory, and they urged people to heed evacuation calls and to prepare for the worst.

In its latest report, the Hurricane Center said the storm surge could be as high as 11 feet above normal along Long Island Sound and Raritan Bay — a significantly higher forecast than in previous reports — and warned that major flooding could occur across a broad area of the East Coast. Forecasters also expected torrential rains in some regions, which would add to the flooding.

And then there is the snow.

As Hurricane Sandy approaches land, it will be drawn into a system known as a midlatitude trough, a severe winter storm that is moving across the country from the west. A burst of arctic air is expected to sweep down through the Canadian Plains just as they are converging. That could lead to several feet of snow in West Virginia and Kentucky and lighter amounts in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Temperatures could drop into the mid-20s.

In announcing the transit shutdown, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said it was unsafe to operate trains in high winds. He also said the closing was intended as a signal to discourage New York-area residents from being “up and about.”

The subway system will begin to curtail service at 7 p.m., and the transit authority’s railroads, Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road, will begin their final trips at the same time, some buses may remain in service until 9 p.m. (It takes about eight hours for the subways to be shut down, but only six for the bus system.)

“The transportation system is the lifeblood of the New York City region, and suspending all service is not a step I take lightly,” Mr. Cuomo said. “But keeping New Yorkers safe is the first priority, and the best way to do that is to make sure they are out of harm’s way before gale-force winds can start wreaking havoc on trains and buses.”

Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said he expected the transit systems to restore at least some service about 12 hours after the storm passes over the area, but he warned that the city could be without transit for as many as two full working days. “I do think Monday and Tuesday are going to be difficult days,” Mr. Lhota said.

He said that if sustained winds reached 39 miles per hour, drivers on the bridges would be required to slow down. At 60 m.p.h., they would be closed to traffic. Outbound trips on the authority’s paratransit service, Access-A-Ride, were scheduled only until noon on Sunday; return trips would continue until 5 p.m.

A full-scale closing of the subways, which run 24 hours a day, had never been ordered until August 2011, as Tropical Storm Irene approached. That storm toppled trees onto the tracks of the commuter rails, flooded train yards and led to millions of dollars in lost fares for the authority, which submitted $65 million in insurance claims this year to recover those losses. The closing this year could prove even more devastating.

Mayor Bloomberg said that city offices would be open Monday and that “city employees should make every effort to report to their jobs on Monday morning.”

City parks and marinas would close at 5 p.m. Sunday, he said.

He called for a mandatory evacuation of Zone A, low-lying areas that include the Rockaways, Coney Island and Red Hook after he revised his assessment of the storm’s potential impact. He said about 375,000 people would have to evacuate. (A guide to those areas can be found here.)

He added that those who ignored the evacuation order were “not going to get arrested, but they are being, I would argue, very selfish.”

Governors across the region have declared emergencies, and federal officials have issued urgent warnings for people to prepare.

From Plymouth, Me., to Cape Hatteras, N.C., residents boarded up windows; stocked up on water, batteries and food; and prepared to hunker down. Airlines encouraged people with flights scheduled in the next few days to change their plans and waived cancellation fees. Though airports remained open, major airlines including Delta, United and American, announced that flights would be canceled.

Amtrak has also shut down train service to parts of the East Coast, including between Washington and New York.

At supply stores across the region, generators and other goods were snapped up in preparation for the possibility of extended power failures.

Tens of thousands of people who live on the state’s densely populated barrier islands — from Sandy Hook to Cape May — were evacuating on Sunday in compliance with an order issued by Gov. Chris Christie.

The evacuation included the 40,000 residents of Atlantic City, where the casinos closed at 3 p.m. on Sunday. All New Jersey Transit service, including buses and rail and light rail lines, were to be suspended starting at 4 p.m.

In Rehoboth Beach, Del., a long line of cars snaked out of town, adhering to the evacuation order announced Saturday night. But some families stopped to take one last picture of the pounding surf.

“It’s just magnificent looking at this,” said Lori Watson, a Rehoboth Beach resident who lives several miles inland and was not evacuating.

Federal officials, in a briefing with reporters on Sunday, could not say for certain where the impact would be worst. Dr. Knabb of the National Hurricane Center said the storm is most likely to come ashore sometime late Monday between Long Island and the Delmarva Peninsula. But he said the storm’s effects would stretch far up and down the coast and deep inland.

Eastern US braces for dangerous superstorm

Eastern US braces for dangerous superstorm

Associated Press Sun Oct 28, 2012 2:11 PM

NEW YORK -- Big cities from Washington to Boston buttoned up on Sunday against the onslaught of a superstorm that could menace some 50 million people in the most heavily populated corridor in the nation, with forecasters warning New York could be in particular peril.

“The time for preparing and talking is about over,” Federal Emergency Management Administrator Craig Fugate warned as Hurricane Sandy made its way up the Atlantic on a collision course with two other weather systems that could turn it into one of the most fearsome storms on record in the U.S. “People need to be acting now.”

Airlines canceled more than 5,000 flights and Amtrak began suspending train service across the Northeast. New York and Philadelphia moved to shut down their subways, buses and trains Sunday night and announced that schools would be closed on Monday. Boston, Washington and Baltimore also called off school.

As rain from the leading edges of the hurricane began to fall over the Northeast, tens of thousands of people in coastal areas from Maryland to Connecticut were under orders to clear out Sunday. That included 50,000 in Delaware alone and 30,000 in Atlantic City, N.J., where the city’s 12 casinos were forced by Gov. Chris Christie to shut down for only the fourth time in the 34-year history of legalized gambling there.

Sandy, a Category 1 hurricane with sustained winds of 75 mph as of Sunday afternoon, was blamed for 65 deaths in the Caribbean before it began churning up the Eastern Seaboard. It was expected to hook left toward the mid-Atlantic coast and come ashore late Monday or early Tuesday, most likely in New Jersey, colliding with a wintry storm moving in from the west and cold air streaming down from the Arctic.

Forecasters said the monster combination could bring close to a foot of rain, a potentially lethal storm surge and punishing winds extending hundreds of miles outward from the storm’s center. It could also dump up to 2 feet of snow in Kentucky, North Carolina and West Virginia.

Louis Uccellini, environmental prediction chief for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told The Associated Press that given Sandy’s east-to-west track into New Jersey, the worst of the storm surge could be just to the north, in New York City, Long Island and northern New Jersey. By some estimates, the metropolitan area could get slammed with an 11-foot wall of water.

“Yes, this is the worst-case scenario,” Uccellini said.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned people in low-lying areas of lower Manhattan and Queens to get out.

“If you don’t evacuate, you are not only endangering your life, you are also endangering the lives of the first responders who are going in to rescue you,” he said. “This is a serious and dangerous storm.”

New York called off school Monday for the city’s 1.1 million students and announced it would suspend all train, bus and subway service Sunday night because of the risk of flooding, shutting down a system on which more than 5 million riders a day depend.

The New York Stock Exchange planned to open for trading as usual Monday, despite fears that flooding could knock out the underground network of power, phone and high-speed Internet lines that are vital to the nation’s financial capital.

Shelters across the region began taking in people.

In the 40 years she has lived in her working-class neighborhood in Wilmington, Del., Bobbie Foote had never run. But the 58-year-old fitness coach decided to heed an evacuation order and head to her daughter’s home.

“My daughter insists that I leave this time,” Foote said as she prepared to leave her apartment building near the Delaware River. “She said I should never put myself in that predicament where I cannot get in or out of where I live.”

The storm forced President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to rearrange their campaign schedules in the crucial closing days of the presidential race. And early voting on Monday in Maryland was canceled.

“In times like this, one of the things that Americans do is we pull together and we help out one another,” the president said in Washington. “And so, there may be elderly populations in your area. Check on your neighbor, check on your friend. Make sure that they are prepared. If we do, then we’re going to get through this storm just fine.”

At least twice as many train passengers as usual crowded the Amtrak waiting area Sunday morning at New York’s Penn Station. Many were trying to leave New York earlier than planned.

The noon and 1 p.m. trains to Boston were sold out. Randall Ross, a bookseller from Shreveport, La., and his traveling companion, Mary McCombs, were waiting for an Amtrak train to Syracuse, the destination they chose after attempts to book flights through eight other cities failed.

“I just want to be somewhere else except New York City,” said McCombs, who will stay with friends in Syracuse until she and Ross can get a flight. “I don’t want to risk it.”

Despite the dire warnings, some souls were refusing to budge.

Jonas Clark of Manchester Township, N.J. — right in the area where Sandy was projected to come ashore — stood outside a convenience store Sunday, calmly sipping a coffee and wondering why people were working themselves “into a tizzy.”

“I’ve seen a lot of major storms in my time, and there’s nothing you can do but take reasonable precautions and ride out things the best you can,” said Clark, 73. “Nature’s going to what it’s going to do. It’s great that there’s so much information out there about what you can do to protect yourself and your home, but it all boils down basically to ‘use your common sense.’”

In New Jersey, Denise Faulkner and her boyfriend showed up at the Atlantic City Convention Center with her 7-month-old daughter and two sons, ages 3 and 12, thinking there was a shelter there. She was dismayed to learn that it was just a gathering point for buses to somewhere else. Last year, they were out of their home for two days because of Hurricane Irene.

“I’m real overwhelmed,” she said as baby Zahiriah, wrapped in a pink blanket with embroidered elephants, slept in a car seat. “We’re at it again. Last year we had to do it. This year we have to do it. And you have to be around all sorts of people — strangers. It’s a bit much.”

Mark Palazzolo was floored when a Facebook plea brought out 30 people Sunday — mostly strangers — to help fill sandbags to protect his bait and tackle shop in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J. One man drove more than two hours to pitch in.

“I think this one’s going to do us in,” said Palazzolo, who used the same wood he boarded up the store with in past storms, crossing out the names of hurricanes Isaac and Irene, and spray-painting “Sandy” next to them. “I got a call from a friend of mine from Florida last night who said, ‘Mark. Get out! If it’s not the storm, it’ll be the aftermath. People are going to be fighting in the streets over gasoline and food.’”

———

Breed reported from Raleigh, N.C.; Contributing to this report were AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein in Washington; Emery Dalesio in Nags Head, N.C.; Wayne Parry in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J.; and Dave Dishneau in Wilmington, Del.

Hurricane Sandy causes closings, cancellations around D.C. region

Posted at 11:00 AM ET, 10/29/2012

Hurricane Sandy causes closings, cancellations around D.C. region

By Washington Post staff

Below are some of the closings and cancelations around the D.C. region due to Hurricane Sandy.

For more information on school closings, check the school websites. The Going Out Guide has information on canceled events here.

You can also find cancellations and delays at http://bit.ly/WaPoClosings.

Are you an official with a school or organization? You can list your cancellation by registering at http://www.cancellations.com/members/.

Government offices:

Federal government — Closed Monday. Non-emergency employees will be granted administrative leave; emergency employees will be required to report to work. Employees should telework if possible.

D.C. government — closed Monday

Alexandria government offices — closed Monday.

Maryland state offices — closed Monday.

Early voting in Maryland and the District — canceled Monday.

Montgomery County government offices — closed Monday.

Prince George's County government offices, circuit and district courts — closed Monday.

D.C. Superior Court — closed Monday.

Federal courts of appeals for the D.C., second and third circuits — closed Monday.

City of Fairfax government offices — closed Monday.

Schools:

D.C. Public schools — closed Monday.

D.C. charter schools — several closed Monday. Here’s the full list.

Fairfax County public schools — closed Monday and Tuesday. School offices closed Monday.

Arlington County public schools and offices — closed Monday.

Alexandria City public schools — closed Monday.

Loudoun County public schools — closed Monday.

Montgomery County public schools — closed Monday and Tuesday.

Calvert County and Howard County schools — closed Monday.

Baltimore City public schools — closed Monday.

Montgomery College — closed Monday.

Prince George’s County public schools — Code Yellow; schools and offices closed Monday.

Prince William County — closed Monday.

Colleges and universities

University of the District of Columbia — closed Monday. Essential personnel report for their normally scheduled hours.

University of Maryland — closed Monday.

University of Mary Washington — closed Monday.

Montgomery College — closed Monday.

American University — closed Monday.

Gallaudet University — closed Monday.

George Washington University — closed Monday; facilities services staff should report to work.

Catholic University — closed Monday.

Georgetown University and medical center — closed Monday.

Marymount University — closed Monday.

Transportation:

Metro rail, buses and MetroAccess — closed Monday.

All MARC train service — canceled Monday.

Parking enforcement in D.C. — suspended Monday.

Amtrak — Northeast Regional, Acela, Keystone and Shuttle service canceled Monday; service north of New York City suspended at 7 p.m. Sunday.

Montgomery County Ride On service — closed Monday.

Maryland Motor Vehicle Administration offices and emission inspection stations — closed Monday.

Greyhound — All service in and out of the District and Baltimore, Norfolk, Silver Spring and Ocean City canceled.

VRE train service — canceled Monday.

City of Fairfax CUE Bus service - canceled Monday.

Capital Bikeshare closed at 1 a.m. Monday.

Airports — many flights canceled coming into and going out of D.C. Check airlines.

Storm Gains Strength as It Churns North

Storm Gains Strength as It Churns North

By JAMES BARRON and BRIAN STELTER

Published: October 29, 2012 410

Hurricane Sandy churned through the Atlantic Ocean on Monday en route to what forecasters agreed would be a devastating landfall that is expected to paralyze life for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states in the Northeast, with widespread power failures, a halt in transportation systems and extensive evacuations.

The huge storm, which has been picking up speed over water, was producing sustained winds of 90 miles per hour by 11 a.m., up from 75 m.p.h. on Sunday night, an indication of continual strengthening. Earlier on Monday, the center of Hurricane Sandy made its expected turn toward the New Jersey coast. The National Hurricane Center said the center of the storm was now moving north northwest at 18 m.p.h.

“A turn toward the northwest is expected soon,” the center’s 11 a.m. advisory said, followed by another turn toward the west northwest. “The center of Sandy is expected to make landfall along or just south of the southern New Jersey coast this evening or tonight.”

With a wary eye on its expected path, residents and emergency management officials braced for the impact of the storm in states like Connecticut, Delaware, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Virginia. Far in advance of the hurricane’s expected landfall, residents were ordered to evacuate, with many seeking refuge in shelters. Mass transit systems ground to a halt, and people stocked up on water and food supplies.

According to forecasters, the storm is on a scale that weather historians say has little precedent along the East Coast. Landfall is predicted on Monday night somewhere between central New Jersey and southern Delaware. But most of the eastern United States will feel Hurricane Sandy’s effects, making the exact landfall spot less important than the overall trajectory.

“One of the biggest storms of our lifetimes is unfolding right now,” the anchor Kelly Cass said as The Weather Channel started its fourth day of nonstop coverage.

Broad Area of Strong Winds

Hurricane-force winds extend up to 175 miles from the center of the storm; tropical-storm-force winds extend up to 485 miles from the center. This means that portions of the coast from Virginia to Massachusetts will feel hurricane-force winds as the storm moves toward land, according to forecasters. Winds of tropical-storm force could stretch all the way north to Canada and all the way west to the Great Lakes, where flood warnings were issued on Sunday.

Some states expected snow, with blizzard warnings issued for mountainous stretches of Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia.

Officials warned that the powerful surge the storm was creating in the ocean, combined with the strong winds, could wreak destruction in the Northeast for days. As many as 10 million people were expected to lose electricity as Hurricane Sandy toppled trees and light poles and ripped down power lines.

As the storm bore down on some of the nation’s most densely populated areas, city and state officials went into emergency mode. The New York City subway system and all of the region’s commuter trains and buses were shut down. The major stock exchanges called off all trading for Monday, and Broadway theaters canceled their shows on Sunday evening and Monday.

Warning that the flooding would be “life-threatening,” forecasters and government officials implored residents in the areas designated for evacuation not to try to ride this storm out.

“We’re going to have a lot of impact, starting with the storm surge,” said Craig Fugate, the administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. “Think, ‘Big.’ ”

Evacuations in New York

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ordered the evacuation of more than 370,000 people in low-lying communities from Coney Island in Brooklyn to Battery Park City in Manhattan and gave 1.1 million schoolchildren a day off on Monday; he also announced that schools would remain closed on Tuesday. The city opened evacuation shelters at 76 public schools.

In New York City, the subway closing began at 7 p.m. Sunday, darkening every one of the city’s 468 stations for the second time in 14 months, as officials encouraged the public to stay indoors and worked to prevent a storm surge from damaging tracks and signal equipment in the tunnels.

The closing this year seemed more ominous. The shutdown before Tropical Storm Irene last year began at noon on a Saturday, and service resumed before the workweek started on Monday. This time, officials warned, it might be Wednesday before trains were running again. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s commuter rail lines, which sustained the heaviest damage during Tropical Storm Irene, were suspended, and New Jersey Transit shut down by 2 a.m.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, warning that the surge from Hurricane Sandy could go two feet higher than Tropical Storm Irene last year, announced that the Holland and Brooklyn-Battery Tunnels would close at 2 p.m. State officials said the two tunnels were prone to flooding.

As for other bridges and tunnels, the governor said that would be blocked off if winds exceeded 60 m.p.h. Some forecasts, he noted, are already calling for blasts of 90 m.p.h.

Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman and chief executive of the transportation authority, said the Queens-Midtown Tunnel had never been closed because of high winds. But he said that if water poured in at one end or the other — in Manhattan or in Queens — “we will recommend to governor that that happen.”

Mr. Lhota said he expected the transit systems to restore at least some service about 12 hours after the storm ended. But he warned that the city could be without mass transit for as many as two full workdays. “I do think Monday and Tuesday are going to be difficult days,” Mr. Lhota said.

The PATH system, buses and the Staten Island Ferry system were also suspended.

Power Concerns

Another fear in the Northeast was that winds from the storm might knock down power lines, and that surging waters could flood utility companies’ generators and other equipment. Consolidated Edison did not provide an estimate of how long customers in the New York City area might be without power if the storm played havoc with its network. But Jersey Central Power and Light warned as long ago as Friday that repairs could take 10 days after the storm passed through. Another utility in New Jersey, the Public Service Electric and Gas Company, said restoring power could take a week.

PECO, the southeastern Pennsylvania utility, reported only scattered power disruptions by about 9 a.m. on Monday but warned that customers would probably go days without electricity when the full effects of the storm were felt.

“With a storm of this magnitude, we are looking at a multiday restoration,” said Martha Phan, a spokeswoman for the utility.

As heavy rain lashed Philadelphia, 3 shelters were opened, with 12 elsewhere in Pennsylvania, with more than 200 people already taking refuge, said Penny Kline, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.

But still, many people chose not to evacuate. That meant that in the seaside town of Rehoboth Beach, Del., and in similarly low-lying towns in South Jersey, residents awoke to widespread road closings on Monday morning, effectively forcing them to shelter in place until the storm passes.

Gov. Jack A. Markell of Delaware decided Sunday night to close all state roads at 5 a.m. Monday, with exceptions for emergency workers and other essential personnel.

“People have had several days to be out preparing for the storm’s arrival,” Mr. Markell said in a statement. “When Sandy hits on Monday, they should be at home or if necessary a shelter to wait out the worst of the storm. Do not put yourself on the road. Do not put yourself and those who may need to rescue you at risk.”

Creeping Storm Surge

Heavy bands of rains pushed inland to Philadelphia, where all mass transit service was suspended, and to Washington, where the transit system, the schools and the federal government were closed.

Hours before landfall, as the storm’s outlying sections pushed wind and water ahead of it, the authorities reported no major damage but said that would almost certainly change as the storm came ashore in the next 24 hours, funneling the surge into New Jersey, New York and Connecticut.

But the storm had already transformed waterways, with the normally placid Sligo Creek in the Maryland suburb of Takoma Park turned into a roaring torrent. The creeping storm surge left standing water from the Atlantic on some of the seafront roads in Rehoboth Beach.

The ocean breached protective barriers. In Atlantic City, N.J., where the boardwalk was damaged, photos posted online showed, while water swamped several blocks into the city.

In Ocean City, Md., the boardwalk pier was “significantly damaged” overnight, said Mike Levy, a public information officer for the Police Department there. The evacuated south end of the resort town, he said, “is getting subjected to quite a bit of flooding.”

In addition to the local mass transit systems, Amtrak canceled most trains on the Eastern Seaboard.

The storm prompted schools in Baltimore and Boston to be closed. The Coast Guard closed New York Harbor — cruise ships were told to go elsewhere — and the Northeast faced the possibility of being all but shut down on Monday. And the United Nations canceled all meetings at its headquarters in Manhattan. The National Hurricane Center said further intensification was quite likely on Monday as the storm converted from tropical (a hurricane) to extratropical — a change that people in its path will probably not even notice.

Forecasters said the hurricane was a strikingly powerful storm that could reach far inland. Forecasters said they expected high-altitude winds to whip every state east of the Mississippi River.

President Obama, who attended a briefing with officials from FEMA, called Hurricane Sandy “a big and serious storm.” He said federal officials were “making sure that we’ve got the best possible response to what is going to be a big and messy system.”

“My main message to everybody involved is that we have to take this seriously,” the president said.

In Atlantic County, N.J., which includes Atlantic City, a curfew and driving ban was put in place at midnight. Gov. Chris Christie had ordered residents to leave barrier islands from Sandy Hook to Cape May, and early on Monday, local authorities said about 400 people were staying in shelters.

About 500 people are in shelters throughout Delaware, Governor Markell said.

For the most part, residents appeared to follow officials’ advice to stock up on bottled water, canned food and flashlights — so much so that stores ran low on batteries. Some gas stations in Connecticut had little gasoline left — no regular, and not much premium.

In an early briefing on Monday, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy, in Connecticut, said 850 national guardsmen and women had been deployed.

A storm surge of between 7 feet to 11 feet was expected, with New London and Bridgeport especially hardest hit, and the worst winds would sweep through from between 3 p.m. to about 3 a.m. Tuesday, with gusts of wind as high as 90 m.p.h. Power failures could last “a long period of time,” Mr. Malloy said.

“Stay home,” he added. “Let me repeat that: Stay home.”

The governor said the potential for loss of life was “extremely high.”

“This is the most catastrophic event that we have faced and been able to plan for in any of our lifetimes,” he said.

Air Travel Troubles

Even before the storm landed, transportation systems were shut down. The nation’s major airlines canceled thousands of flights in the Northeast. Bradley International Airport near Hartford was closing on Monday afternoon, Mr. Malloy said.

Even before the storm landed, transportation systems were shut down. The nation’s major airlines canceled thousands of flights in the Northeast. Bradley International Airport near Hartford was closing on Monday afternoon, Mr. Malloy said.

But the three major airports in and around New York City remained open on Monday morning, even though the airlines had canceled all flights into and out of them, said Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Mr. Coleman said there were about 30 stranded passengers at La Guardia Airport in Queens and about 30 more at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. He did not provide an estimate for Kennedy International Airport, also in Queens. He said that the Port Authority had provided cots and blankets to the travelers and that they were welcome to stay until the storm passes. Service on the AirTrain shuttles to Kennedy and Newark has been suspended, he said. Many public libraries said their reading rooms would be closed for the day, and parks department workers in Central Park told people to leave on Sunday and to stay away until the storm passed.

The New York Stock Exchange, which initially said its trading floor would be open on Monday, decided to close the floor and suspend all trading on Monday. The closing was the first caused by bad weather since Hurricane Gloria in 1985, although the opening bell has been delayed a number of times — once during a blizzard in January 1996 — and the exchange was closed for three days after the Sept. 11 attacks. The Nasdaq exchange also announced it would be closed on Monday.

Forecasters said Hurricane Sandy could deliver something besides wind and rain: snow. Several feet of heavy, wet snow was expected in West Virginia and lighter amounts in Pennsylvania and Ohio that could bring down trees and power lines if already chilly temperatures drop below freezing.

The full moon on Monday could cause even greater flooding, because tides will be at their peak.

But it was the possibility of a surge that prompted many to take precautions. The hurricane center said the surges could reach 11 feet in New York Harbor, Long Island Sound and Raritan Bay in New Jersey — significantly higher than previous forecasts and significantly above the levels recorded during the tropical storm last year.

Forecasters said the water could top eight feet from Ocean City, Md., to the border between Connecticut and Rhode Island. They predicted the waves would rise to six feet on the south shore of Cape Cod.

A higher surge was one reason that Mayor Bloomberg ordered mandatory evacuations in low-lying areas of New York City, just as he did before Tropical Storm Irene. One city official said there was particular concern about Con Edison’s Lower Manhattan infrastructure, noting that if the storm surge washed over the bulkheads, it could damage the utility’s electrical and steam networks. If the surge runs as high as forecast, Con Ed will shut off two electrical networks in Lower Manhattan.

As Governor Cuomo announced that two New York City tunnels would be closing by midafternoon, many people took advantage of the arteries that connect Manhattan with other boroughs until the last minute, to get to work, or wondered how they would return home.

Michael Maxwell, 56, a porter at the Sweeney Building, a luxury condominium at 30 Main Street in Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn, had taken a car service from Canarsie to arrive at his morning shift. If he finished early, he said, he hoped to be able to take a car service home; otherwise, he would sleep in the locker room. A few people walked; between 7:15 and 8 a.m., only a half-dozen hardy souls headed across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan by foot. Most of them were public employees, headed to offices downtown.

Phil Amato, 45, a maintenance worker, said he would sleep in the building where he works, across from the stock exchange, until he could take the subway home to Brooklyn.

“I’m staying till it’s over,” he said.

Protecting Property

People also tried to protect their homes from the floods and wind, shoring up thresholds and taping windows.

In a flood-prone neighborhood in Philadelphia, Michael Dornblum did something he did not do during Tropical Storm Irene or earlier storms that brought high water — he put 80-pound sandbags outside his family’s furniture store. In the past, he has lined them up only inside. He put the additional protection in place as employees prepared to lift carpets and sofas off the showroom floor. Some went to a storage area on the second floor.

In North Carolina, Highway 12, which links the Outer Banks to the mainland, was covered in water in four locations from Hatteras Island to Cedar Island, according to Bobby Hill, director of emergency management for the North Carolina Ferry Division.

Noah Lynk, a maritime engineer, was part of a standby crew stationed at the Cherry Branch Ferry Terminal. He said the level of flooding in the area was typical of a strong northeaster or offshore hurricane.

“When they come real close like this, most people go out surfing,” he said. “Unfortunately for us we have to work.”

Hurricane Sandy delivers high winds and torrential rains

Hurricane Sandy delivers high winds and torrential rains

Storm destroys downtown pier in Ocean City

By Scott Dance, Mary Gail Hare and Erin Cox, The Baltimore Sun

12:09 p.m. EDT, October 29, 2012

As Hurricane Sandy pounds the mid-Atlantic coast Monday, the Baltimore region is bracing for gale-force winds and flooding.

The area remains under a flood watch through Tuesday evening, with coastal flooding expected late Monday into Wednesday morning, according to the National Weather Service. Heavy rain, as much as six inches, and high winds, with gusts as much as 70 miles per hour, will occur throughout Monday afternoon and well into Tuesday, according to forecasters.

Gov. Martin O'Malley warned of the danger of the storm Monday. "There will be people who will die and are killed in this storm," the governor said while visiting the Maryland Emergency Management Agency. "Stay off the roads, hunker down with your families."

He said his blunt talk was designed to "truthfully identify this as a killer storm" so people stay off the roads and inside.

"My biggest concern is the potential loss of life," O'Malley continued. "This will be unlike any storm we've had."

At 8 a.m. Monday, Hurricane Sandy was positioned off the North Carolina coast and continuing on a northwest track. The storm is expected to bring a life-threatening storm surge and coastal hurricane winds and heavy Appalachian snows, said forecasters.

Ocean City's downtown pier has been destroyed overnight, town officials confirmed, as Hurricane Sandy pounds the shores with massive surf.

Town police spokesman Michael Levy said there is extensive damage to the pier, though webcams show some of the structure still standing. Town officials will provide more details at a press conference Monday.

The pier sits at the southern end of the Boardwalk, in the area south of 17th Street under a mandatory evacuation since Sunday afternoon because of flooding.

Wind gusts of up to 50 mph were recorded in the Ocean City inlet near the pier overnight Sunday, according to the National Weather Service. Storm surge was expected to reach 8 feet in the height of the storm late Monday into Tuesday, with wind gusts likely to reach hurricane force of at least 75 mph.

Traffic on major arteries was light early Monday as motorists apparently heeded warnings to stay off roads as Hurricane Sandy slopped into the region.

Rain fell in sheets on Maryland highways Monday morning, a prelude to the hurricane-force winds and downpour expected to hit later Monday and continue into Tuesday.

"Everything else is shut down, so there's not a lot of cars on the road," John Loftus said during a stop on his commute from Silver Spring to Baltimore, where he'll check on construction sites.

"Now tomorrow, once I know everything is safe, that's when I'll stay home. I think tomorrow's going to be the worst of it."

Sandy is expected to turn toward the northwest later Monday morning. The center of the storm will move over the coast of the Mid-Atlantic states Monday evening and make land on the southern New Jersey shore about midnight.

An Air Force hurricane hunter plane is reporting winds near 85 miles per hour in the storm. Sustained winds are already occurring along the coast and will extend as far inland as the central and southern Chesapeake Bay areas, forecasters said.

The combination of an extremely dangerous storm surge and tide will cause coastal flooding of as much as six feet in the lower Chesapeake Bay areas and with as much as four feet farther north. Surge-related flooding can vary given the storm's winds and the tide, forecaster said.

By Tuesday evening, temperatures are expected to drop into the low 40s. Southwest wind gusts will be lower but still at about 40 miles per hour. Showers will continue well into Tuesday night. The storm could also cause an 18-inch snowfall in the mountains of Western Maryland.

One the few things not to worry about Monday: a storm surge slopping water into the Baltimore Harbor.

Jim Lee, meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said that despite the high tide from the full moon, winds from Hurricane Sandy will create a "blow-out" tide, pushing water out of the harbor as the hurricane slops over land.

But Lee said to expect a surge on Tuesday as Hurricane Sandy's winds shift course.

"As Sandy treks north, then the wind starts coming out of the south, and we're expecting some of that water to blow back in," Lee said.

Sandy, as of Monday afternoon a Category 1 hurricane sandwiched between weather systems steering it toward land, has forced coastal evacuations from the Eastern Shore to New York City.

"They've towed all the cars off the street," said Brett Henry, manger of Henderson's Wharf Inn in Fells Point. "It's pretty much a ghost town, so to speak."

The hotel suffered extensive flood damage from Tropical Storm Isabel in 2003. For Hurricane Sandy, the hotel decide to shut its doors completely.

Henry plans to ride out the storm at the hotel, keeping an eye on the rising tide into Monday night and Tuesday, he said.

Schools across the region were closed, governments and trash collection halted, and major public transportation systems shut down in anticipation of a pummeling from Sandy. Harford County schools have announced that they will be closed Tuesday, with code green for employees.

Annapolis closed the harbor at City Dock, suspended all bus service and called off trash collection. As of 10:30 a.m., there had been no reports of flooding in the city, but with water already pooling, officials expect floods as Hurricane Sandy gets closer to land.

Anne Arundel County Executive John R. Leopold is answering phones at the county's emergency operations center, his spokesman said. Three roads prone to flooding have already been closed: River Road in Crownsville, Governor's Bridge road near Davidsonville and Montevideo Road near Jessup.

Arundel Mills mall announced it would be closed Monday.

The Annapolis director of emergency management, Kevin J. Simmons, said city police officers are pairing with National Guard with Humvees in order to make patrols Monday. He said the city has also sent out community notifications to residents in low-lying areas urging them to take shelter inland. Annapolis High School is open to residents.

Robert B. Thomas, Jr., a Harford County spokesman, said Beards Hill Road and Maxa Road in Aberdeen had been closed this morning due to flooding. "We do have some areas of the county where we've had some trees fallen," he said. But no other damage has been reported this morning, he said.

Battalion Chief Eric Proctor with the Howard County fire department said the county remained relatively quiet Monday morning. "We're just bracing. No increase in our call volume yet," he said.

Baltimore closed roads and opened shelters Monday as officials expected flooding from Hurricane Sandy.

As steady rain pounded the city, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said the following streets would be closed due to potential flooding.

• Clipper Mill at Meadow Mills Business Park

• 1900 block Falls Road (near Streetcar Museum)

• Monument Street at Pulaski Highway

• Aliceanna at Caroline Street

• North Point at Kane West

The mayor also announced that the Charm City Circulator bus service was canceled Monday.

Baltimore also established shelters, opening at 9 a.m. at the following locations:

• War Memorial Building- Lexington and Gay Streets

• Baltimore Junior Academy- 3006

• West Cold Spring Lane

• Oliver Community Center- 1400 East Federal Street

• Edmondson High School- 4501 Edmondson Avenue

• Patterson Park High School- 100 Kane Street

• Forest Park High School- 3701 Eldorado Avenue

Baltimore's main animal shelter began relocating dogs and cats to First Mariner Arena Monday because of potential flooding at its building on Stockholm Street near M&T Bank Stadium.

The shelter, the Baltimore Animal Rescue and Care Shelter Inc., said the public should not go to the arena, and it's not accepting any animals right now. The shelter said it expects to reopen Wednesday at 2 p.m.

Baltimore County Executive Kevin Kamenetz declared a state of emergency for the county Monday morning. He said in a statement that the county will open an emergency shelter at Eastern Technical High School, 1100 Mace Ave., at 1 p.m. Monday. The shelter is pet-friendly. He also said that trash and recycling pick-ups are suspended from 2 p.m. Monday today through Tuesday.

Airlines canceled flights along the coast, stranding people such as the Normandeau family thousands of miles from home and forcing them to race north ahead of Sandy.

"When they canceled our flight, they told us we couldn't get out until Thursday," Patricia Normandeau said as she rifled through a rental car's trunk at a rest stop on I-95 south of Baltimore. En route from West Palm Beach, Fla. to outside Portland, Maine, the family keeps checking smartphones in hopes they can make better time than the behemoth storm that's churning north at 15 miles an hour.

"We left at 3 p.m. yesterday, and we've just been taking turns driving," Normandeau said at 7 a.m. Monday. "We only hit rain about two hours ago."

Across the lot, John Esposito rested briefly on his overnight drive from South Carolina to New Jersey, cutting short his vacation to join his son and dogs before the worst of Sandy hits. He hopes to roll into Hazlet, N.J., by mid-morning Monday, when Sandy still feels like a chilly autumn downpour instead of the worst storm to hit the area in 75 years.

"It's been uneventful, so far," Esposito said, adding he plans to keep it that way by racing home early.

"With hurricanes, you just have to learn," he said. "You get a sense of what you can and can't do."

Mary.gail.hare@baltsun.com

Sun reporter Luke Broadwater contributed to this report.

Hurricane Sandy starting to cause power outages, flooding in N.J.

Hurricane Sandy starting to cause power outages, flooding in N.J.

Kelly Heyboer/ The Star-Ledger By Kelly Heyboer/ The Star-Ledger

on October 29, 2012 at 8:25 AM, updated October 29, 2012 at 12:06 PM

With the heart of the storm still hundreds of miles off shore, the first effects of Hurricane Sandy are slamming New Jersey this morning, causing power outages, flooding and road closures as the state braces for landfall.

The storm strengthened overnight and was about 310 miles south-southeast of New York City at 8 a.m., according to the National Hurricane Center. The storm was headed north-northwest at 20 mph with sustained winds clocking in at 85 mph.

Forecasters say the massive hurricane is still on target to directly impact the New Jersey shore, bringing life-threatening flooding and devastating wind.

"Tropical storm conditions or gale force winds are already occurring over portions of the mid-Atlantic states from North Carolina northward to Long Island," the National Hurricane Center advisory said.

Waves from the bay have gone over the bulkhead and low lying local streets were flooded and impassable in Keyport, Union Beach and Port Monmouth.

In Atlantic City, winds are gusting to tropical storm strength and pounding rain has begun to fall. Casinos were shut down at 4 p.m. Sunday after Gov. Chris Christie declared a state of emergency for the entire state.

Before the sun came up, Atlantic City's streets began to flood. By 7:30 a.m., the streets immediately around the new Revel casino and hotel were covered with more than a foot of water, witnesses said.

Parts of Black Horse Pike in West Atlantic City, Route 30 and Route 9 in Absecon, Route 559 in Somers Point and Route 322 in Hamilton are already flooded, county officials said. Roads in Hamilton Township and Mays Landing were also impassable.

With the first high tide expected at 7:41 a.m., most residents were not sticking around to see if the water surged over Atlantic City's boardwalk.

"Approximately 400 to 500 people are currently housed in the five shelters in Atlantic County. Buena Middle School is full," said Linda Gilmore, Atlantic County's public information officer.

Other parts of the shore were also bracing for the day's first high tide at Sandy Hook (8:01 a.m), Seaside Heights 7:31 a.m.) and Cape May (8:15 a.m.).

Forecasters said this evening's high tide is expected to bring the worst flooding because Sandy's storm surge is expected to hit just as the tides are peaking.

In low-lying Salem County, weather conditions were deteriorating this morning, though some drivers were still on the roads. The county hugs the Delaware River and is prone to flooding and power outages, but the region has built up a defensive over the years in the form of a pumping system that carries the water back to the river.

Jeff Pompper, the director of Salem County's Office of Emergency Management, said the county suffered some minor tidal flooding last night, but nothing significant.

"We expect that to change," he said.

In Ocean County, police shut down the Mathis and Mantoloking Bridges this morning, blocking all access to Seaside Heights. Several streets in Lavalette were already lined with floating debris brought on by the surging ocean water during the morning high tide.

"They built up those dunes about 8 feet high, and now they're gone," said Jim McCann, standing outside his Lavalette house with his wife, Denise.

The McCanns have lived in Lavalette for 14 years, and they plan to ride out the storm even though they believe they're the only residents left on Hardeen Avenue. Even as he watched lawn chairs, boards and sand blow by his front door, McCann seemed unconcerned.

"This is the first surge, after that we'll be OK," McCann said. "But I think we're the only ones left."

The Delaware River was beginning to climb the walls at Riverview Beach Park in Pennsville Township this morning. The park sits at the base of the Route 295 bridge connecting New Jersey and Delaware.

Lenora Boninfante, communications director for Cape May County, said no power outages have been reported by Atlantic Electric.

She said some areas in the barrier islands that are prone to flooding are taking on water, but the county is concerned about moderate tidal flooding during this morning's high tide.

"Right now the rain is continuing to come down. The wind is picking up and everybody is prepared to react," she said.

She said four National Guard trucks are stationed throughout the county on standby.

As of 3:30 a.m., PSE&G is reporting 829 customers without power due to the early effects of Hurricane Sandy. Of that total, 794 of the outages are located in Deptford Township in Gloucester County. As of 5 a.m., JCP&L reported about 5,000 customers without power in Burlington and Ocean county, including more than 4,000 in Toms River.

President Obama signed an emergency declaration for New Jersey over the weekend, at Christie's request. The declaration allows the state to apply for federal funding and other help as the storm arrives.

HURRICANE SANDY UPDATE

STATUS: Sandy remained a Category 1 hurricane as of 8 a.m. Monday.

STRENGTH: Maximum sustained winds of 85 mph; 946 mb pressure.

LOCATION: Center of the storm was 265 miles southeast of Atlantic City, and 310 miles south-southeast of New York City, as of 8 a.m. Monday

SPEED & DIRECTION: Moving north at 20 mph, an increase of 5 miles per hour from earlier.

OUTLOOK: Sandy is moving north-northwestward and accelerating. Hurricane force winds are expected along the Jersey Shore later today. A turn toward the northwest is expected later this morning followed by a turn toward the west-northwest tonight.

Source: National Hurricane Center

Staff writers Mark Di Ionno, Jarrett Renshaw and Ryan Hutchins contributed to this report.

Hurricane Sandy winds increase to 90 mph as flooding worsens in parts of N.J.

Hurricane Sandy winds increase to 90 mph as flooding worsens in parts of N.J.

Kelly Heyboer/ The Star-Ledger By Kelly Heyboer/ The Star-Ledger

on October 29, 2012 at 12:33 PM, updated October 29, 2012 at 12:38 PM

With Hurricane Sandy churning in the Atlantic and preparing to turn westward, New Jersey's barrier islands and shore towns are getting battered by early flooding and brutal winds as the state braces for the full force of the historic storm to hit later today.

The morning high tide sent water surging into Atlantic City, Long Beach Island, Seaside Heights and other shore towns, flooding some businesses, trapping residents in cars and closing roads. Farther inland, high tide also forced the Raritan River to overflow its banks in New Brunswick, though city officials said the water did not overflow Route 18.

Several major roadways, including a large portion of the Garden State Parkway, are closed. The Holland Tunnel will close at 2 p.m. today.

Emergency officials around the state are gearing up for this evening's high tide, which is expected to coincide with the arrival of Hurricane Sandy and cause more serious flooding.

The massive hurricane is still on target to turn westward and make landfall on or near the Jersey Shore, bringing a "life-threatening storm surge and coastal hurricane winds," according to the 11 a.m. update from the National Hurricane Center.

The storm gained strength overnight and was about 205 miles southeast of Atlantic City, according to the last update. Sustained winds were peaking at 90 mph and the storm had slowed slightly to 18 mph.

"The center of Sandy is expected to make landfall along or just south of the southern New Jersey coast this evening or tonight," the latest National Hurricane Center alert said.

The rising water forced state officials to close the Garden State Parkway in both directions from mile marker 0 in Cape May to Exit 38 at the Atlantic City Expressway interchange.

"Water is starting to get close to the surface," Dee said of the roadway. "Conditions are deteriorating down there."

Port Authority officials said the Holland Tunnel will also close at 2 p.m. today until further notice as the storm churns the waters between New York and New Jersey. Due to high winds, speeds on the George Washington Bridge, Outerbridge Crossing and Goethals Bridge and Bayonne Bridge are reduced to 35 mph until further notice. hurricane-symbol.jpg

"Motorists are advised that they should expect additional significant closures on both the Parkway and Turnpike in the coming hours as conditions continue to deteriorate," according to a statement from Gov. Chris Christie's office. "All unnecessary travel should be avoided, but motorists who absolutely must travel should check www.511nj.org for up-to-the-minute information on travel conditions and road closures."

Though the brunt of the storm has not hit yet, power outages are reported around the state.

As of noon, Public Service Electric & Gas reported 2,100 customers without power, down from 4,000 or so about an hour before.

Jersey Central Power & Light reported 11,000 without power, thanks to growing numbers of outages in Ocean County, Monmouth County and Morris County. Atlantic City Electric's outage map reported 1,800 customers out around Atlantic City and around 3,000 additional outages along the Garden State Parkway between Sea Isle City and Ocean City.

Down the Shore, water continued to rise in Atlantic City after this morning's high tide left much of the city underwater. More than a foot of seawater was on the streets around the new Revel casino and hotel on the boardwalk. In other parts of the city, water was up to the car hoods of vehicles left parked on the streets near the ocean.

More than 500 people were in area shelters. Some residents who did not evacuate ventured outside, fighting through thigh-deep water and powerful winds gusts.

Some watched from their homes as flooding approached, declaring they weren't scared.

"I've been through a lot, storms and everything," said Henry Rodriguez, 50, who said today's flooding is already worse than it was during the 1992 storm that swamped the city. "I'm not afraid."

As Hurricane Sandy approaches, local roads in the northern part of the state are also closing.

In Hoboken, where street flooding is expected, driving is prohibited after 4 p.m. today, city officials said.

In New Brunswick, Route 18 was reopened this morning at the request of the State Police. But all roads into the city from the highway remain closed, said Russell Marchetta, the city spokesman.

Marchetta said the high tide this morning brought the Raritan River over its banks into Boyd Park, but did not make it onto Route 18. The next high tide on the river is at 8:30 p.m.

Mandatory evacuations are continuing in neighborhoods along Route 18, county officials said. There are also voluntary evacuations in Old Bridge, Sayreville and South Amboy along Raritan Bay. Carteret, along the Arthur Kill opposite Staten Island, and South River also asked residents in low-lying neighborhoods to evacuate.

In Cranford, which was the hardest-hit community in Union County during Hurricane Irene, winds are gusting and intermittent rain is falling as the township waits for the onslaught of Sandy. Much of the town is under a mandatory evacuation order, told to leave by noon.

Residents, many of whom are still recovering from having their homes flooded by Irene, now can only wait.

"I think the community is traumatized by all of this," said Mayor David Robinson, who was one of those flooded last year. His basement filled with 8 feet of water during Irene.

With flights in and out of Newark cancelled for the duration of the storm, some travelers were preparing to spend a second night in Newark Liberty International Airport.

"We had the mattress on the floor last night, and tonight we have the cot off the floor, which is good," said Julie Petrick, of Los Angeles, who was supposed to fly home on Sunday night. She spent the night in a makeshift shelter in Terminal B.

Already destructive Sandy strengthens on way to Jersey coast

Posted: Mon, Oct. 29, 2012, 5:10 AM

Already destructive Sandy strengthens on way to Jersey coast

By Frank Kummer, Amy S. Rosenberg and Jonathan Lai

**Updated 12:15 p.m.: Sandy stronger; Shore already flooding; Part of A.C. Boardwalk collapses; 35,000 in N.J. without power; Obama to oversee preparations**

A massive Hurricane Sandy, almost 1,000 miles across, has turned toward New Jersey with strenthening winds and is already having a major impact including Shore flooding.

The storm is expected to land tonight on the New Jersey coast with historic flooding expected. But heavy rain and advancing wind gusts have caused problems 10 hours before landfall.

Severe, possibly unprecedented damage is threatening the Shore, forecasters say.

Sandy started to make a left-turn toward New Jersey about 5 a.m., churning in a massive sweep straight toward Atlantic or Cape May counties in meteorologists say should be a storm of historical proportions.

By 11 a.m., it was 205 miles southeast of Atlantic City, but was already battering the region, having dumped more than three inches of rain in some parts.

By noon, Sandy was on a direct collision course with the Garden State. And it had increased in intensity, with maximum sustained winds of 90 m.p.h., chugging across the Atlantic Ocean t 18 m.p.h.

Parts of the boardwalk in Atlantic City were washing away at the northern end. Some pieces of the famed boardwalk were found a block or more away.

President Obama returned to the White House to oversee storm preparations, CNN was reporting.

N.J. Gov. Chris Christie said 35,000 utility customers were without power as of noon, and was warning residents along the coast to get out.

"This is not a time to be a showoff," Christie said. "This is not a time to be stupid ... tonight is going to be signficantly worse on the barrier islands."

The governor said that, at some point, emergency responders will no longer be able to carry out rescues. Helicopters are already grounded.

Dean Iovino, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service, said this morning that the northern part of the New Jersey coast will bear the brunt when it makes landfall tonight because of the counter-clockwise rotation of the storm.

But all of the Shore will be battered as the storm barrels in just after high tide. The surge is already flooding the coast. Rain has been steady. Winds are expected to increase through the evening with gusts reaching 60 m.p.h. around 9 p.m. Sustained winds should be in the 30 to 40 m.p.h. range throughout the day.

"It looks like we're not only going to exceed record levels, but exceed them substantially," Iovino said of flooding, "especially at the North Jersey shore - which is not to say that there's not going to be bad flooding south of that.

"They might experience something we haven't seen before, perhaps in recorded time."

Worse, is the timing that will coincide with high tide. Officials were attempting to get Shore residents to take the storm seriously, but about 70 percent of Brigantine's 9,500 residents have remained on the island, police said.

And, there are already reports that the bay is meeting the Atlantic Ocean near Longport. Emergency officials in Ventnor said people were calling throughout the night desperate to get out. The Atlantic City Expressway is still open.

The Breaking News Network reported that members of the Atlantic City Fire Department firehouse at N. Annapolis and Crossan Aves. were stuck in the station because of flooding.

And severel flooding has been reported on Second and Third Avenues in North Wildwood.

A range of 5 to 10 inches of rain is expected to fall through tomorrow, coupled with high winds - a combination that has utility companies expecting downed trees and power lines, plunging thousands into darkness, and swamping basements with water.

The weather service has issued a flood warning for Montgomery, Philadelphia, Delaware, and Chester counties.

Most Southern New Jersey counties are also under flood watch and U.S. Postal Service spokesperson Ray V. Daiutolo Sr. said some isolated areas of the state may not see delivery today.

Though winds were still weak, trees were already falling in some areas. In Cherry Hill, a tree fell on a car on southbound I-295. And, In Delaware County, a tree fell on a house in the 400 block of School Lane in the Drexel Hill section of Upper Darby. The impact damaged a room where an infant was sleeping.

The baby was transported to Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, according to Ed Truitt, emergency Services Director for Delaware County. He did not know the extent of the baby's injuries.

Since midnight only a half inch of rain had fallen in the county with top wind speeds of 15 miles per hour, Truitt said. Shelters are being established throughout the county including Upper Darby, Darby Borough, Havertown Township and ridley township. He has no reports of anyone using the shelters.

"The worst is yet to come," Truitt said.

Rain and winds should diminish by mid-day Tuesday.

At 6 this morning, about 15 people waited in line at the Home Depot in Cherry Hill, Camden County.

"I'm looking for a generator," Mark Tomafsky, 39, of Maple Shade, Burlington County, said. "I have five kids at home."

All those in line surveyed said they were looking for generators. But the store had none, a scene played out throughout big box hardware centers in the region.

Tomafsky has five children, including eight-month-old twin boys, up through an 11-year old. He fears a loss of power and not being able to feed his family. And, he fears his battery-backup sump won't last long if he loses power for more than eight hours.

Omar Lopez, an assistant manager at the store, said he has not seen anything like the demand for supplies - even with Hurricane Irene.

"This is way bigger, and it's been like this for four days," Lopez said.

As of last night, the advancing storm had forced evacuation of Shore towns, grounded hundreds of flights at Philadelphia International Airport, led SEPTA to suspend mass transit, and prompted school officials across the region to cancel classes. Governors in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware declared states of emergency.

According to county dispatchers, driving restrictions are in in Delaware, Bucks, and Camden counties. As of early this morning, there were no driving restrictions in Chester and Montgomery counties in Pennsylvania, nor were there restrictions in Burlington, or Gloucester counties in New Jersey.

Entrance and exit ramps for I-95 have been closed on Broad Street.

President Obama has signed Emergency Declarations for a number of states, including New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

"Philadelphia is in the path," Mayor Nutter warned about 10:30 p.m. Sunday. "We will see very severe winds, four to eight inches of rain in a very short period of time. . . . We will get through this, because we are prepared."

The region has effectively shut down, with mass transit, taxi services, malls, universities, and government agencies all announcing one-or two-day closures.

All flights are canceled at Philadelphia International Airport.

On Sunday, people waited in lines for gasoline, and supermarkets ran short of peanut butter, bread, and water. People waited days for supplies of generators.

A major threat was storm surges that could erode beaches and damage property.

"This is a storm surge you'll see once in 50 years. That's the kind of thing that's coming," said Jack Boston, expert senior meteorologist with Accelerate.

The National Hurricane Center was referring to the storm as "life-threatening."

Philadelphia can expect gusts of near-hurricane force Monday night and rain of four to eight inches between Monday and Wednesday. Boston called Hurricane Sandy a "hybrid between a northeaster and a hurricane" because of its size.

Gov. Corbett declared a state of emergency and said at a news conference that 1,600 National Guard troops were prepared to help in the event of a disaster. "We are prepared for the worst and hope for the best," he said.

Gov. Christie said all schools in Gloucester, Salem, and Mercer Counties would be closed Monday and Tuesday. He ordered closure of state offices and suspension of NJ Transit services.

Caravans of power-company trucks from Southern states were barreling toward the region.

Staff Writers Mari A. Schaefer and Peter Mucha also contributed to this story.

Outages: Thousands lose power, worse feared

Posted: Mon, Oct. 29, 2012, 9:06 AM

Outages: Thousands lose power, worse feared

By Peter Mucha

Inquirer Staff Writer

Hurricane Sandy, with the Jersey Shore at the center of its sights, could go into the record books in terms of power outages, officials fear.

With heavy rain all day and sustained winds of tropical storm strength for hours this evening, this gigantic system - more than 600 miles across - could topple trees and down wires across a half-dozen or more states, especially New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York.

Some officials fear that full restoration could take more than a week - through Election Day.

As of shortly after noon - even as the Shore was getting pounded by storm surge, and rains and winds were picking up across the Philadelphia area - the outage numbers were climbing but far from catastrophic.

In July, a major line of thunderstorms knocked out electrical service for more than 150,000 homes and businesses in the region.

"We know the worst is yet to come," said PECO spokeswoman Martha Phan as the afternoon began. "We expect the numbers to climb dramatically."

PECO was reporting "scattered" outages on its website, but the actual number was approaching 10,000, according to Phan.

Atlantic City Electric was reporting fluctuating numbers - down to about 6,000 by early afternoon from more than 20,000 earlier - across the southern part of South Jersey, from Gloucester County to Long Beach Island. An Ocean County outage affecting more than 10,000 was apparently restored quickly. (AC Electric customers can report outages at 1-800-833-7476.)

PSE&G was reporting several thousand outages, but mostly in North Jersey. The problems in Burlington and Camden Counties were roughly in the hundreds. (To report an outage: 1-800-436 7734.)

Delmarva Power & Light, serving Delaware and Eastern Maryland, was reporting about 6,000 (To report an outage: 1-800-898-8042 for New Castle County, 1-800-898-8045 for Kent and Sussex Counties.)

PPL Electric, which serves most of Eastern Pennsylvania, was reporting more than 2,500 homes and businesses without power, including nearly 700 in Lancaster County. (To report an outage: 1-800-342-5775.)

(To report an outage to PECO: 1-800-841-4141.)

Shallow Waters and Unusual Path May Worsen the Surge

Shallow Waters and Unusual Path May Worsen the Surge

By KENNETH CHANG and HENRY FOUNTAIN

Published: October 28, 2012

Like a hand pushing water in a bathtub, the winds of a hurricane push the water of the Atlantic Ocean. When the windblown water runs up against land, the water piles up and flows inland. That describes a storm surge.

“It’s almost a little bit like a tsunami,” said Klaus H. Jacob, a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

When Hurricane Sandy makes landfall late Monday or early Tuesday, the pulse of windblown water will be “in a word, bad,” Dr. Jacob said. “It’s of course still somewhat uncertain. It all depends on the exact timing.”

Storm surges like those accompanying Hurricane Sandy as it churns north are, at their simplest, a function of strong winds driving too much water into too small a space. But other factors, some of which will come into play as this storm approaches the New York area, can combine to make surges higher and more destructive, experts said.

“A storm surge is really caused by one thing,” said Pat Fitzpatrick, an associate research professor at Mississippi State University who studies the phenomenon. “When a storm is approaching land, it starts to encounter shallow water. The water tends to pile up.”

The height of a surge depends to a great extent on how shallow the water is near the coast. “The shallower the water is, for longer distance, the more vulnerable an area is,” Mr. Fitzpatrick said.

The New York area has extensive shallow water offshore, and was expected to see some of the largest surges — National Weather Service computer models were predicting a storm surge of 6 to 11 feet at Battery Park at the lower end of Manhattan. The surge also could coincide with high tide at about 9 p.m. Monday, with tides even higher than usual because of the full moon.

“It’s kind of a worst-case scenario for the New York Harbor area,” said Alan Cope, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, N.J.

Hurricane Sandy is much larger, with greater surge potential, than the devastating Tropical Storm Irene last year, with winds already up to 60 miles an hour over an area more than 500 miles northeast of its center. Adding to the potential for damage was the hurricane’s unusual track. The expected path northwest will trap water against the shores of New York and New Jersey, Mr. Cope said.

“It’s going to blow the water from east to the west and pile it up in Raritan Bay and also pile it up in the western end of Long Island Sound,” he said.

Many Atlantic hurricanes move parallel to the coast for long distances and then, pushed by high-level winds, veer northeast, eventually “spinning out,” or losing their energy, over the North Atlantic. But by the time it nears New York on Monday, Hurricane Sandy will have traveled hundreds of miles from the coast for several days, picking up enormous amounts of water over the open ocean.

The storm’s winds, which are rotating in counterclockwise, are creating an area of strong ocean waves north and east of the storm’s center. “That amplifies the surge,” said Louis Uccellini, director of the National Centers for Environmental Prediction, part of the National Weather Service.

As Hurricane Sandy approaches New York, forecasters expect it to hit a roadblock. Instead of veering northeast and out to sea, the storm will be forced to move west by a strong and persistent region of high-pressure air over southeastern Canada and southern Greenland.

“It’s quite unusual to have this westward component of motion to a hurricane track,” said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for the Web site Weather Underground.

As it moves west, the hurricane is expected to make landfall in New Jersey, perpendicular to the coast. Such a head-on hit can produce worse surges than a glancing blow because more water can be driven into estuaries and harbors.

“The bottom line for New York and New Jersey and Long Island Sound is that they are going to have the worst of the surge and coastal inundation,” Mr. Uccellini said.

But strong surges are only one aspect of this storm that makes it potentially deadly, he added.

Its highly unusual westward track will contribute to another feature — the transition to more of a winter storm that is expected to bring high winds and large amounts of rain and snow to parts of the mid-Atlantic states and into Appalachia and the Ohio Valley. Even Lake Michigan may see winds of 50 m.p.h., Mr. Masters said, before the storm finally dies out later in the week.

The storm gathered energy the way all tropical storms and hurricanes do — from convection that occurred as it passed over the relatively warm ocean water. But as it moves farther north and then west, the storm will gain less energy in this way.

Instead, it will encounter a trough of cold, high air that has dipped down from Canada. As this cold front meets the warm air of the storm, the cold air will sink, adding to the storm’s energy. This strengthening, caused by what is known as baroclinic forcing, will enable the storm to unleash more mayhem as it moves inland.

“The thermal gradient as this trough digs in is a very important part of energetics of this storm,” Mr. Uccellini said.

The shift to what forecasters call an extratropical storm will alter the structure of the air masses as they come together, Mr. Uccellini said. Instead of the colder air being to the north and west of the storm’s center, it will loop around to the south. That will contribute heavy rains across parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland, and perhaps up to two feet of snow in parts of western Virginia, eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and southeastern Ohio.

Dr. Jacob of Columbia University led a study last year looking at the potential impact of climate change and rising sea levels on the city, and the chances of a flood devastating the subway system. Such a storm, he said, happens once a century.

Hurricane Sandy, he added, could be “just at the tipping point” of causing a 100-year flood. The weather could still change. The storm could change direction. It could speed up or slow down, and miss high tide.

“If we’re lucky, it’s not as bad,” Dr. Jacob said. “That would be more luck than preparation. We will know on Tuesday morning.”

A state-by-state look at the East Coast superstorm

A state-by-state look at the East Coast superstorm

By The Associated Press | Associated Press

Hurricane Sandy is churning off the East Coast and is expected to join up with two other weather systems to create a huge and problematic storm affecting 50 million people. Here's a snapshot of what is happening or expected, state by state.

CAROLINAS

The U.S. Coast Guard rescued 14 members of a crew forced to abandon a tall ship about 90 miles off the North Carolina coast and continued to search for two other crew members. The storm lashed barrier islands and rendered several homes and businesses nearly inaccessible.

CONNECTICUT

The University of Connecticut is closing Tuesday, joining a hundreds of other schools and school systems across the state. The closure includes UConn's law school and the UConn Health Center, though the John Dempsey Hospital will remain open during the storm. Power outages: 55,000.

DELAWARE

Dover Air Force Base has relocated some aircraft in anticipation of the storm, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has requested that the base be used as a staging area for support and supplies. Some residents of low-lying areas of the base have been ordered to evacuate.

KENTUCKY

Sandy is expected to bring snow to far southeastern Kentucky. A winter storm warning is in effect in Harlan, Letcher and Pike counties through Wednesday morning. Forecasters say snow could accumulate from 4 to 10 inches in high elevations and 1 to 3 inches in lower elevations.

MAINE

Virtually all Maine public schools opened Monday but some were closing early before the heaviest rain and wind from Hurricane Sandy. State officials say the biggest concern is wind, which is expected to cause widespread power outages. The state's utilities say they have crews poised to deal with expected power outages, including some from Canada. Power outages: 5,700.

MARYLAND

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley has closed the Bay Bridge because of the storm. The bridge spans the Chesapeake Bay, connecting the state's eastern and western shores. Hurricane Sandy already has caused heavy damage to a large, iconic ocean pier in the Maryland beach resort of Ocean City.

MASSACHUSETTS

Voluntary evacuation recommendations have been issued in Scituate, Lynn, New Bedford and Plum Island. The recommendations are for just certain sections of the communities that could be affected by flooding as a result of Hurricane Sandy. A Red Cross spokeswoman said just a few people stayed at its shelters Sunday night, but she expects more people Monday night and into Tuesday. Power outages: 56,000.

MICHIGAN

Michigan utilities say high winds could cause power outages in the state and they're keeping an eye on the weather to respond to power problems. DTE Energy Co. said gusts of 50 mph Monday evening and Tuesday could affect some it its 2.1 million customers.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Gov. John Lynch has urged all drivers to be off the roads by 3 p.m. as Hurricane Sandy approaches. Lynch declared a state of emergency and directed that non-essential state workers be released from work Monday afternoon. He urged employers to consider releasing workers early. The governor has put 100 New Hampshire Guard soldiers on active duty. Power outages: 47,400.

NEW JERSEY

All roads into and out of Ocean City are closed due to flooding that has cut off the popular Jersey shore resort community. Hurricane Sandy already had flooded most of Atlantic City, sweeping away an old section of the city's famed boardwalk. Power outages: 95,000.

NEW YORK

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the city's public schools will remain closed on Tuesday after being shut down Monday. Earlier, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and Holland Tunnel would close at 2 p.m. Monday. Airports in the metropolitan New York City area are open, but air carriers are not operating. Power outages: 263,000.

OHIO

Residents of low-lying areas and along Lake Erie were told to watch for flooding; utilities are anticipating high winds that could blow down trees and poles. Snow is forecast in some areas.

PENNSYLVANIA

Officials from the state transit agency and the Pennsylvania Turnpike have instituted speed restrictions over concerns about high winds and ordered certain vehicles, including empty trucks and motorcycles, off some highways. The National Weather Service says southeastern Pennsylvania could get winds reaching 75 mph and rainfall up to 10 inches. Power outages: 25,000.

RHODE ISLAND

Officials are concerned about wind driving water north up Narragansett Bay, which could create flooding in low-lying areas of the upper bay, including Providence, Warwick and Cranston. About 2,600 National Grid customers were without power, mostly in Barrington and other parts of Bristol County. Power outages: 12,000.

TENNESSEE

Snow is expected in higher elevations, where a freeze warning has been issued. High winds are expected in many areas.

VERMONT

Gov. Peter Shumlin declared a state of emergency to provide access to National Guard troops in a state still recovering from the devastating effects of the remnants of Hurricane Irene. Culverts and storm drainage basins in some spots have been cleared of debris. Power outages: 4,000.

VIRGINIA

A curfew is in place on Virginia's swamped Chincoteague Island. Officials say the entire 37-square-mile island is underwater, and there is no way off the island because a causeway to the mainland has been closed. The 3,500 islanders who decided to tough out Hurricane Sandy have been told to keep off the streets. Power outages: 9,500.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Taxis that originate in Washington are authorized to add an emergency flat rate of $15 per trip because of Hurricane Sandy, starting Monday. The price is supposed to expire at noon Tuesday, but can be extended if considered necessary. The capital area's transit system shut down rail service for the first time since 2003. Power outages: 2,300.

WEST VIRGINIA

Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin declared a state of emergency Monday for West Virginia, where Sandy is expected to bring high winds and heavy rains and leave behind flooded towns and as much as 3 feet of snow on the state's highest ridge tops. Eastern parts of the state can expect to get up to 6 inches of rain. Fourteen counties are under blizzard warnings.

WISCONSIN:

With waves expected to reach as high as 33 feet Tuesday on Lake Michigan, the Port of Milwaukee is taking steps to protect its docks and boats. The superstorm bearing down on the East Coast Is expected to create dangerous conditions on the Great Lakes. The National Weather Service issued gale and storm warnings for the lakes through Wednesday.

East Coast grinds to a halt as superstorm Sandy nears

East Coast grinds to a halt as superstorm Sandy nears

By Jennifer Peltz Associated Press Mon Oct 29, 2012 10:07 AM

NEW YORK — A fast-strengthening Hurricane Sandy churned north Monday, raking ghost-town cities along the Northeast corridor with rain and wind gusts. Subways and schools were closed across the region of 50 million people, the floor of the New York Stock Exchange was deserted, and thousands fled inland to await the storm’s fury.

The monster hurricane was expected to make a westward lurch and aim for New Jersey, blowing ashore Monday night and combining with two other weather systems — a wintry storm from the west and cold air rushing in from the Arctic — to create an epic superstorm.

Authorities warned that New York City and Long Island could get the worst of the storm surge — an 11-foot onslaught of seawater that could swamp lower Manhattan, flood the subways and cripple the underground network of electrical and communications lines that are vital to the nation’s financial capital.

Because of Sandy’s vast reach, with tropical storm-force winds extending almost 500 miles from its center, other major cities across the Northeast — Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Boston — also prepared for the worst.

“The days ahead are going to be very difficult,” Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley said. “There will be people who die and are killed in this storm.”

By late morning, the storm had strengthened to 90 mph and had already knocked out power to tens of thousands of people. Sandy was about 200 miles southeast of Atlantic City, N.J., where the emptied-out streets were mostly under water and where an old section of the historic boardwalk broke up and washed away.

Authorities moved to close the Holland Tunnel, which connects New York and New Jersey, and a tunnel between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Street grates above the New York subway were boarded up, but officials worried that seawater would seep in and damage the electrical switches.

Millions of people in the storm’s path stayed home from work. Subways, buses and trains shut down, and more than 7,000 flights in and out of the East were canceled, snarling travel around the globe. Hundreds of thousands of people were under orders to flee the coast, including 375,000 in lower Manhattan and other parts of New York City, but authorities warned that the time to get out was short or already past.

Sheila Gladden evacuated her home in Philadelphia’s flood-prone Eastwick neighborhood and headed to a hotel.

“I’m not going through this again,” said Gladden, who had 5 1/2 feet of water in her home after Hurricane Floyd in 1999.

“I think this one’s going to do us in,” said Mark Palazzolo, who boarded up his bait-and-tackle shop in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., with the same wood he used in past storms, crossing out the names of Hurricanes Isaac and Irene and spray-painting “Sandy” next to them.

“I got a call from a friend of mine from Florida last night who said, ‘Mark, get out! If it’s not the storm, it’ll be the aftermath. People are going to be fighting in the streets over gasoline and food.’”

President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney called off their campaign events at the very height of the presidential race, with just over a week to go before Election Day. And early voting was canceled Monday in Maryland and Washington, D.C.

The president declared emergencies in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, authorizing federal relief work to begin well ahead of time. He promised the government would “respond big and respond fast” after the storm hits.

“My message to the governors as well as to the mayors is anything they need, we will be there, and we will cut through red tape,” Obama said. “We are not going to get bogged down with a lot of rules.”

Sandy, a Category 1 hurricane, was blamed for 69 deaths in the Caribbean before it began traveling northward, parallel to the Eastern Seaboard. As of 11 a.m., it was moving at 18 mph, with hurricane-force winds extending an extraordinary 175 miles from its center.

Forecasters said the combined Frankenstorm could bring close to a foot of rain in places, a potentially lethal storm surge of 4 to 11 feet across much of the region, and punishing winds that could cause widespread power outages that last for days. Up to 3 feet of snow was forecast for the West Virginia mountains.

About 90 miles off Cape Hatteras, N.C., the Coast Guard rescued 14 crew members by helicopter from the HMS Bounty, a replica 18th-century sailing ship that sank in the storm. The Coast Guard searched for two other crew members. The ship was built for the 1962 Marlon Brando film “Mutiny on the Bounty.”

The rescued had donned survival suits and life jackets and boarded two lifeboats after the ship began taking on water. They were plucked from 18-foot seas just before sunrise.

O’Malley, the Maryland governor, said a fishing pier in the beach resort of Ocean City, not far from a popular boardwalk and amusement park, was “half-gone.” The area had been ordered evacuated on Sunday.

Water was already a foot deep on the streets of Lindenhurst, N.Y., along the southern edge of Long Island, and the canals around the island’s Great South Bay were bulging two hours before high tide. Gale-force winds blew overnight over coastal North Carolina, southeastern Virginia, the Delmarva Peninsula and coastal New Jersey.

In the morning, water was already splashing over the seawalls at the southern tip of Manhattan and had matched the levels seen during Hurricane Irene in August 2011. Still, people were out jogging, walking their dogs and even taking children out in strollers amid gusts of wind.

“We’re high up enough, so I’m not worried about flooding,” said Mark Vial, who was pushing his 2-year-old daughter, Maziyar, in a stroller outside their building, where they live on the 15th floor. “There’s plenty of food. We’ll be OK.”

The major American stock exchanges closed for the day, the first unplanned shutdown since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The floor of the NYSE, typically bustling with traders on a Monday morning, fell within the city’s mandatory evacuation zone. The United Nations canceled all meetings at its New York headquarters.

New York called off school on both Monday and Tuesday for the city’s 1.1 million students, and the more than 5 million people who depend on its transit network every day were left without a way to get around.

“If you don’t evacuate, you are not only endangering your life, you are also endangering the lives of the first responders who are going in to rescue you,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg warned. “This is a serious and dangerous storm.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was typically blunt: “Don’t be stupid. Get out.”

Craig Fugate, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said FEMA teams were deployed from North Carolina to Maine and as far inland as West Virginia, bringing generators and basic supplies that will be needed in the storm’s aftermath.

“I have not been around long enough to see a hurricane forecast with a snow advisory in it,” Fugate told NBC’s “Today” show.

———

Allen Breed reported from Raleigh, N.C.; Contributing to this report were AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein in Washington; Katie Zezima in Atlantic City, N.J.; David Porter in Pompton Lakes, N.J.; Wayne Parry in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J.; and David Dishneau in Delaware.

Superstorm Sandy - Sorry I lost the original title

NEW YORK — As Superstorm Sandy churned slowly inland, millions along the U.S. East Coast awoke Tuesday without power or mass transit, and huge swaths of New York City were unusually dark and abandoned. At least 18 people were killed in seven states.

The storm that made landfall in New Jersey on Monday evening with 80 mph sustained winds cut power to more than 6 million homes and businesses from the Carolinas to Ohio and put the presidential campaign on hold one week before Election Day.

New York was among the hardest hit, with its financial heart closed for a second day and seawater cascading into the still-gaping construction pit at the World Trade Center. The storm caused the worst damage in the 108-year history of New York’s extensive subway system, according to Joseph Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

“This will be one for the record books,” said John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Consolidated Edison, which had more than 670,000 customers without power in and around New York City.

Trading at the New York Stock Exchange was canceled again Tuesday — the first time the exchange suspended operations for two consecutive days due to weather since a blizzard in 1888.

President Barack Obama declared a major disaster in New York and Long Island, making federal funding available to residents of the area. The damage is “almost incalculable,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said as he spoke with TV networks Tuesday morning.

New York City’s three major airports remained closed. Overall, more than 13,500 flights had been canceled for Monday and Tuesday, almost all related to the storm, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware.

Curiosity turned to concern overnight as New York City residents watched whole neighborhoods disappear into darkness as power was cut. The World Trade Center site was a glowing ghost near the tip of Lower Manhattan. Residents reported seeing no lights but the strobes of emergency vehicles and the glimpses of flashlights in nearby apartments. Lobbies were flooded, cars floated and people started to worry about food.

A fire continued to rage in a city neighborhood Tuesday morning near the Atlantic Ocean, with 80 to 100 homes destroyed but no deaths reported.

An unprecedented 13-foot surge of seawater — 3 feet above the previous record — gushed into lower Manhattan, inundating tunnels, subway stations and the electrical system that powers Wall Street and sent hospital patients and tourists scrambling for safety. Skyscrapers swayed and creaked in winds that partially toppled a crane 74 stories above Midtown.

In New Jersey, where the superstorm came ashore, hundreds of people were being evacuated in rising water early Tuesday. Officials were using boats to try to rescue about 800 people living in a trailer park in Moonachie. There were no reports of injuries or deaths. Local authorities initially reported a levee had broken, but Gov. Chris Christie said a berm overflowed.

The massive storm reached well into the Midwest. Chicago officials warned residents to stay away from the Lake Michigan shore as the city prepared for winds of up to 60 mph and waves exceeding 24 feet well into Wednesday.

As Hurricane Sandy closed in on the Northeast, it converged with a cold-weather system that turned it into a monstrous hybrid of rain and high winds — even bringing snow in West Virginia and other mountainous areas inland.

Remnants of the now-former Category 1 hurricane were forecast to head across Pennsylvania before taking another sharp turn into western New York state by Wednesday morning. As of 5 a.m. Tuesday, the storm was centered about 90 miles west of Philadelphia.

Although weakening as it goes, the massive storm — which caused wind warnings from Florida to Canada — will continue to bring heavy rain and local flooding, said Daniel Brown, warning coordination meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Just before it made landfall at 8 p.m. near Atlantic City, New Jersey, forecasters stripped Sandy of hurricane status, but the distinction was purely technical, based on its shape and internal temperature. It still packed hurricane-force winds.

While the hurricane’s 90 mph winds registered as only a Category 1 on a scale of five, it packed “astoundingly low” barometric pressure, giving it terrific energy to push water inland, said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at MIT.

Officials blamed at least 18 deaths in the U.S. on the converging storms —in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, North Carolina and West Virginia. Three victims were children, one just 8 years old. At least one death was blamed on the storm in Canada. Several deaths were from falling trees and branches.

Sandy killed 69 people in the Caribbean before making its way up the Atlantic Coast.

Even before it made landfall in New Jersey, crashing waves had claimed an old, 50-foot (15-meter) piece of Atlantic City’s world-famous Boardwalk.

“We are looking at the highest storm surges ever recorded” in the Northeast, said Jeff Masters, meteorology director for Weather Underground, a private forecasting service.

The New York metropolitan area got the worst of it. An explosion at a ConEdison power substation knocked out power to about 310,000 customers in Manhattan.

“It sounded like the Fourth of July,” Stephen Weisbrot said from his apartment in lower Manhattan.

New York University’s Tisch Hospital was forced to evacuate 200 patients after its backup generator failed. NYU Medical Dean Robert Grossman said patients — among them 20 babies from the neonatal intensive care unit who were on battery-powered respirators — had to be carried down staircases and to dozens of ambulances waiting to take them to other hospitals.

Tunnels and bridges to Manhattan were shut down, and some flooded.

A construction crane atop a $1.5 billion luxury high-rise overlooking Central Park collapsed in high winds and dangled precariously. Thousands of people were ordered to leave several nearby buildings as a precaution, including 900 guests at the ultramodern Le Parker Meridien hotel.

Alice Goldberg, 15, a tourist from Paris, was watching television in the hotel — whose slogan is “Uptown, Not Uptight” — when a voice came over the loudspeaker and told everyone to leave.

“They said to take only what we needed, and leave the rest, because we’ll come back in two or three days,” she said as she and hundreds of others gathered in the luggage-strewn marble lobby. “I hope so.”

Off North Carolina, not far from an area known as “the Graveyard of the Atlantic,” a replica of the 18th-century sailing ship HMS Bounty that was built for the 1962 movie “Mutiny on the Bounty” sank when her diesel engine and bilge pumps failed. Coast Guard helicopters plucked 14 crew members from rubber lifeboats bobbing in 18-foot (5.4-meter) seas. A 15th crew member who was found unresponsive several hours after the others was later pronounced dead. The Bounty’s captain was still missing.

Obama scrapped his campaign events for Monday and Tuesday to stay at the White House to oversee the government’s response to the superstorm. Romney was going ahead with a planned event in Ohio on Tuesday, but his campaign said its focus would be on storm relief.

Sandy: NYC a mess; fire destroys 80 flooded homes

Sandy: NYC a mess; fire destroys 80 flooded homes

Associated Press Tue Oct 30, 2012 8:05 AM

NEW YORK — New York City awakened Tuesday to a flooded subway system, shuttered financial markets and hundreds of thousands of people without power a day after a wall of seawater and high winds slammed into the city, destroying buildings and flooding tunnels.

Scenes of the damage were everywhere. At least 80 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.

Where usually bustling crowds and traffic jams streamed through sidewalks, streets and subways, they were largely empty. 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 deposited in intersections and green metal Dumpsters tossed on their sides.

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.

Water lapped over the seawall in Battery Park City, flooding rail yards, subway tracks, tunnels and roads. 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.

“We knew that this was going to be a very dangerous storm, and the storm has met our expectations,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “This is a once-in-a-long-time storm.”

In Queens, nearly 200 firefighters tried to contain an enormous blaze that consumed at least 80 homes in the Breezy Point neighborhood. They had to use a boat to make rescues, firefighters told WABC-TV. They climbed an awning to reach about 25 trapped people and take them down to a boat.

Officials weren’t immediately able to pin down the cause of the blaze.

Water surged into two major commuter tunnels — the Brooklyn Battery and the Queens Midtown — along with seven subway tunnels under the East River. The agency is assessing damage and will restore the system as quickly as it can, MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota said.

The rains and howling winds 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.

After a backup generator 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 outside into the weather. Gusts of wind blew their blankets as nurses held IVs and other equipment.

About 670,000 homes and businesses were without power late Monday in the city and suburban Westchester County.

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.

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.

The city shut all three of its airports, its subways, schools, stock exchanges, Broadway theaters and closed several bridges and tunnels Monday as the weather worsened. By evening, a record 13-foot storm surge was threatening Manhattan’s southern tip and utilities deliberately darkened part of the borough to avoid storm damage.

It could be several days to a week before all residents who lost power during the storm get their lights back, Miksad said.

On Tuesday, the New York Stock Exchange was to be closed again — the first time it’s been closed for two consecutive days due to weather since 1888, when a blizzard struck the city.

At 4 a.m., few people were out on the streets. Times Square was lit but empty of people. Round-the-clock restaurants and bars that would have been wrapping up after last call were closed. Only a handful of taxis plied the streets — but there was an abundance of emergency and police vehicles.

Uptown, windows of apartments and businesses glowed. But to cross through midtown was to be swallowed by darkness. Only a few emergency or backup lights appeared in buildings.

Late Monday, an explosion at a substation at 14th Street and FDR Drive contributed to the power outages. No one was injured, and ConEd did not know whether the explosion was caused by flooding or by flying debris.

Earlier in the day, another 1 million customers lost power in New York City, the northern suburbs and coastal Long Island, where floodwaters swamped cars, downed trees and put neighborhoods under water.

At least six people were killed in the New York City area, most by falling trees. The dead included two boys, ages 11 and 13, who were killed when a tree fell on a home in suburban Westchester County.

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.

Sandy: Blizzard warning in Appalachian states

Sandy: Blizzard warning in Appalachian states

By Vicki Smith Associated Press Tue Oct 30, 2012 7:12 AM

ELKINS, W.Va. — Wet snow and high winds spinning off the edge of superstorm Sandy spread blizzard conditions over parts of West Virginia and neighboring Appalachian states Tuesday, shutting one interstate as trucks and cars bogged down and knocking out power to many.

The National Weather Service said a foot and more of snow was reported in lower elevations of West Virginia, where most towns and roads are. High elevations in the mountains were getting more than two feet and a blizzard warning for parts of the state was in effect until Wednesday afternoon.

More than 205,000 customers in West Virginia were without power early Tuesday. In Elkins, a city of about 7,000 people, power went out across town before dawn and the only lights were from passing snow plows as heavy, wet flakes piled up to about 8 inches.

Authorities closed more than 45 miles of Interstate 68 on either side of the West Virginia-Maryland state line because of blizzard conditions and stuck cars.

More than 3o other highways and roads were closed in West Virginia by snow, ice, high water, and downed trees and power lines. Department of Transportation spokeswoman Leslie Fitzwater said. Schools were closed in at least 39 counties

On the Maryland side of I-68, crews were trying to remove several tractor-trailers stuck on the highway. Four or five passenger vehicles also were abandoned in the median, State Highway Administration spokeswoman Kelly Boulware said.

The higher elevations in western parts of Maryland received more than a foot of snow since Monday afternoon, and it was still snowing Tuesday before dawn, Boulware said.

Police rescued several stranded motorists on the interstate in West Virginia, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

Officials in West Virginia said a woman was killed Monday in a storm-related traffic accident. A spokeswoman for Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said about 5 inches of snow had fallen in the area of Tucker County where the crash occurred, making road conditions treacherous.

A significant winter storm continued in northeast Tennessee and the Great Smoky Mountains, where the National Weather Service forecast continuing snow showers over the higher elevations through Wednesday morning.

At least 2 dead in Maryland from Sandy; D.C. region mostly shut down, but Metro to resume service

At least 2 dead in Maryland from Sandy; D.C. region mostly shut down, but Metro to resume service

By Debbi Wilgoren, Fredrick Kunkle and Jeremy Borden, Updated: Tuesday, October 30, 7:50 AM

The Washington area escaped the worst of the devastation brought to the East Coast by Hurricane Sandy, although more than 140,000 households were without power Tuesday morning and at least two local deaths were being attributed to the storm.

Rain and winds had tapered off considerably, and temperatures had dropped to a chilly 42 degrees. Scattered flooding, downed trees and felled branches prompted another another day of shuttered schools and government offices , and officials warned that flooding could worsen over the next two days as the tide rises and as storm-swollen rivers and creeks flow from the north and west into local waterways.

But the predictions of near-apocalyptic destruction did not come true for the nation’s capital, and in one of the first signs of normalcy, Metro announced it would reopen at 2 p.m. With most area power outages concentrated in Northern Virginia, residents of Bethesda, Rockville and other jurisdictions that historically have experienced long power outages exulted at their relative good fortune.

“It’s kind of a vacation for me,” said Debra Cameron, of North Bethesda, who based on the forecast and her experience in past storms had prepared for a prolonged period without electricity.

Her lights never flickered, however. And her work was cancelled for the day, which left her with free time and no real storm fallout to contend with.

Moi Grace, 32, was also ready for a lengthy power outage — having stocked up on ice and non-perishable foods and charged every electronic device she and her family own. All Monday evening, she waited.

“The lights flickered very briefly three times,” Grace, of Rockville, said. But the power stayed on.By 9 a.m. Tuesday, Grace’s young daughters were watching television and playing with their electronics, and her husband had gone to work.

The family was grateful.“I’m extremely excited about having power,” Green said. “You don’t know unless you’re without power how addicted we are.”

To the north, east and west of the region, the story was very different. The storm system brought blizzard conditions to West Virginia and western Maryland, pummeled beach towns on the Maryland, Delaware and Virginia coasts and overwhelmed much of New York and New Jersey

An estimated 7.5 million people were without power up and down the East Coast, with at least 18 people in seven states believed to have died in the storm. A Montgomery County, Md. woman was killed in a head-on collision in Clarksburg on Monday morning, and a Pasadena man was killed when a tree fell on his house Monday night. Authorities were working to determine whether other deaths might also be related to the storm.

In addition, a Laurel man was in critical condition, and two women were in serious condition, after being taken to a hospital for treatment of apparent carbon monoxide poisoning stemming from improper use of a generator, authorities said.

In Ocean City, Md., where the pier was shorn in two on Monday, maintenance crews braved a cold, blustery wind and began to clear streets and the town’s iconic boardwalk. Nearly 10 inches of rain deluged the town, which was also battered by hurricane force-gusts that ripped signs off posts, tore heavy metal benches off their perches and scattered sand and debris far from the beach. No major injuries were reported.

In Ocean City, Md., where the pier was shorn in two on Monday, maintenance crews braved a cold, blustery wind and began to clear streets and the town’s iconic boardwalk. Nearly 10 inches of rain deluged the town, which was also battered by hurricane force-gusts that ripped signs off posts, tore heavy metal benches off their perches and scattered sand and debris far from the beach. No major injuries were reported.

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge, which closed Monday afternoon because of dangerously high winds, reopened at 9 a.m. MARC train service remained suspended., but Amtrak was considering resuming limited service north and south of New York City on Wednesday.

In Fairfax County, authorities reported that 52 trees fell onto homes in the county, though no one was hurt. Ninety roads were closed because of flooding or downed trees, and 100 traffic lights were not working because of power outages.

In the District, by comparison, only one intersection was without power, at Minnesota Avenue and Ely Place SE.

“It obviously could have been a lot worse” D.C. Department of Transportation spokesman John Lisle said. “In terms of the signals out and power outages I’ve seen, it doesn’t look that overwhelming.”

In downtown Annapolis, the water in the harbor rose until it spilled into an adjacent parking lot, flooded Storm Bros. Ice Cream Factory and other nearby shops and restaurants and forced the closure of a couple of streets.

The water stopped well short of the iconic Market House, a traditional yardstick for flooding. It also appeared to stop at the edge of the Naval Academy’s manicured campus.

“This is pretty much typical,” said Pat Horm, 64, an Annapolis resident since 1987. “This can happen here after any big rain storm. … Isabel was clear up the street.” She was referring to Hurricane Isabel, which submerged much of the lower part of downtown Annapolis in 2003. Photos of that historic storm remain on sale at several downtown shops. .

More flooding was expected throughout the area, however. Officials said the Potomac River had risen six inches between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m., and was less than a foot from its banks in some places. The National Weather Service said water levels should crest Wednesday or Thursday.

In Alexandria, 20 people were evacuated and displaced when the roof was torn off of the garden-style apartment building where they lived, according to the Virginia State Police. Wind also blew off the roofs of two other buildings in Alexandria, and about 10 homes were damaged by falling trees, police said.

A power outage at a Howard County water reclamation plant caused sewage to pour into the main stem of the Little Patuxent River at the rate of 2 million gallons per hour.

In the hard-hit city of Crisfield, Md., National Guard and swift water rescue teams evacuated more than 100 people from the Summer’s Cove area. Electricity had been cut off entirely to the city, and some residents remained stranded in the dark, sheltering on the second floor of homes flooded with five feet or more of water, officials said.

Sandy's U.S. death toll reaches 12; two N.Y. hospitals evacuated

Sandy's U.S. death toll reaches 12; two N.Y. hospitals evacuated

By Tina Susman, David Zucchino and Scott Gold

October 29, 2012, 10:59 p.m.

NEW YORK — More than 200 patients were being evacuated from two Manhattan hospitals late Monday after backup power systems failed in the wake of Sandy, a massive storm that roared ashore in New Jersey, swamping New York, killing at least 12 people and wreaking havoc across a huge swath of the Northeast.

The backup generator failed at NYU Langone Medical Center, New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said. Nearly 50 of the patients were described as “critical” and were being taken to the Mt. Sinai Medical Center. A second New York facility, Bellevue Hospital Center, had a similar problem and had to evacuate, the New York Fire Department said.

In the evacuated Breezy Point area of Queens, a fire devoured 15 homes, authorities said.

Chaos pervaded a wide area of the East. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission declared an alert at the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in New Jersey after floodwater rose 6 feet above sea level. The plant powers more than half a million homes but was already out of service for a previously scheduled refueling. The water was expected to recede, and the alert was the second-lowest of the NRC’s four “action levels.”

According to official accounts and media reports, falling trees killed an 8-year-old boy in Franklin Township, Penn., and a 62-year-old man in Boytertown, Penn. Authorities said a firefighter in Easton, Conn., was killed in the line of duty, but they did not release details.

Falling trees also killed people in the New York borough of Queens; in the community of Roslyn on Long Island; in Mendham Township and Hawthorne, N.J.; and in Mansfield, Conn. A woman died in a storm-related car crash in Maryland, and in Toronto, a woman was killed by a falling sign.

Earlier Monday in North Carolina, a replica of an iconic British transport vessel sank in churning seas, killing at least one crew member. The HMS Bounty, built for the 1962 Marlon Brando film “Mutiny on the Bounty,” was featured in several other films and welcomed by large crowds at numerous ports. It was en route to St. Petersburg, Fla., when it began to take on water southeast of Cape Hatteras, N.C.

One crew member’s body was recovered and 15 others were rescued by Coast Guard helicopters. The 63-year-old captain was still missing.

The storm's center crashed ashore a little after 8 p.m. EDT, delivering a powerful blow to the most populous region of the United States, paralyzing epicenters of power and commerce and plunging smaller coastal communities into crisis. More than 3 million homes and businesses, including the lower third of Manhattan, were without power.

Shortly before midnight, Sandy was near Philadelphia, moving northwest at 18 mph and carrying sustained winds of 75 mph, according to the National Weather Service.

Turbulent days lay ahead: In New Jersey, the Hudson River had invaded Hoboken. In West Virginia and Maryland, a blizzard was underway. In New York, water poured into subway tunnels and the World Trade Center site; exploding transformers lit up the dreary sky and 300 calls to 911 flooded in each minute. Bloomberg said downed power lines had sparked numerous fires.

“These are not games,” Bloomberg said. “Things have gotten tough. But we’re going to get through this together.”

Sandy's center passed over land just south of Atlantic City, N.J., but the precise landfall site didn’t matter. Sandy was a freak event — a late-season hurricane hemmed in by weather bands, gobbling up the energy of the Gulf Stream while growing into a ragged, 1,000-mile-wide storm.

By the time it came ashore, authorities had changed Sandy’s formal description from a hurricane to a “post-tropical cyclone,” a non-tropical weather event. The scientific distinctions seemed lost on the storm. As Sandy grew, so did its power to push a wall of sea water onto shore — with such force that some rivers were expected to run backward.

The result was a plodding ogre of a storm, powerful more because of its scope than its sheer strength. The metropolitan areas of Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York were most immediately in the cross hairs, but Sandy cast tropical-storm-strength winds from the Carolinas to Maine. Hurricane-force winds stretched from Virginia to Massachussets.

Because of its size, Sandy was more than a coastal event. Officials predicted 33-foot waves in Lake Michigan and high winds in Indiana. In Ohio, high winds were predicted to generate 20-foot waves on Lake Erie, posing a flood risk. There were formal government warnings of one variety or another in 23 states, and 60 million people — nearly 1 in 5 Americans — could weather the storm before the end of the week.

The storm’s impact was so varied and widespread that Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley called his state “America’s weather in miniature.” Maryland was being pounded on both ends of the state. There were blizzard warnings to the west, with some areas expected to receive as much as 2 feet of snow, and flood warnings for the area around Chesapeake Bay, with storm surges as high as 4 feet forecast for Tuesday.

“This is going to be a long night,'' O'Malley said.

Government officials implored the public to take precautions and heed evacuation orders.

“Don’t be stupid,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told his constituents.

The normally by-the-book National Weather Service delivered this message to those who were resisting calls to evacuate: “THINK ABOUT YOUR LOVED ONES. … THINK ABOUT THE RESCUE/RECOVERY TEAMS WHO WILL RESCUE YOU IF YOU ARE INJURED OR RECOVER YOUR REMAINS IF YOU DO NOT SURVIVE.”

Landfall came with darkness, the last flickers of daylight revealing one ominous image after another: firefighters in Long Island wading through three feet of water to get to a house fully engulfed in flames; chunks of the fabled Atlantic City boardwalk, the oldest in America, floating past avenues whose names are on the Monopoly board — Pacific, Ventnor, Atlantic.

White-capped waves barked at the marble-stepped foot of the Jefferson Memorial in Washington and splashed over park benches at Stuyvesant Cove Park near New York City’s East Village. A portion of Wall Street was under water, and fire stations in New York and New Jersey were being evacuated — one, in Manhattan, by boat. The floor of the New York Stock Exchange, Times Square, the monuments on the National Mall in Washington — all were deserted.

Those snapshots portended a week of misery in the Northeast, federal authorities warned. The storm was expected to stall near Philadelphia, and then curl slowly toward the north and east — strafing Pennsylvania on Tuesday, New York state on Wednesday, New England and Canada on Friday and Saturday.

After a storm surge as high as 12 feet battered coastal areas, freshwater flooding was expected to wash over pockets of the Northeast. The tale of the next few days will likely be water, water everywhere — from the sky as rain, hail and snow; from the ocean, surging in rivers and back bays with nowhere to go. Power outages could linger for days.

“This is a long-duration event,” said Rick Knabb, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

The federal government announced that its offices would be closed again on Tuesday, and analysts warned that damage could top $10 billion.

In Midtown Manhattan, a crane attached to a luxury high-rise called One57 partially collapsed, and was dangling 1,000 feet above West 57th Street. One57 is scheduled to be New York City’s tallest building with residences; its penthouse sold last spring for $90 million. By Monday night, pieces of the crane began smashing some of the windows, sprinkling glass onto the street and forcing the evacuation of a nearby hotel.

“With the winds as they are, we cannot secure it,” Bloomberg said.

Hundreds of thousands of people had evacuated their homes — and many had declined.

With her apartment key dangling on a lanyard around her neck, Venus Jones Johnson trudged through a driving rain to a shelter at West Philadelphia High School in Pennsylvania. Johnson, 45, lives alone in a rented room.

“I kept hearing about this big disaster headed our way, so I figured I should find a better place,” said Johnson, her winter coat slick with rain.

Darryl Bradley, 44, said he had tried to stick it out at home last summer during Hurricane Irene, which killed more than 50 people — and collapsed part of Bradley’s ceiling.

“They say this one is going to be much bigger and much worse, and last a lot longer,” Bradley said after arriving at the shelter. “I barely survived Irene, so I’m not trying that again.”

Not everyone wanted to go. In New York, a small but steady stream of gawkers could not resist watching the harbor rise around them. At the waterfront in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood, Nicholas Martin sipped coffee and watched the water rippling in — up the side of a brick warehouse, around a telephone pole.

“I don’t think the flood is really going to get all the way to our apartment,” Martin said hopefully, and a bit tentatively. Down the street, three people could be seen throwing suitcases into the back of a pickup truck and driving off.

In Philadelphia, Cain Carducci was remarkably calm, considering he lives on a pier over the rapidly rising water of the Delaware River. Carducci, 23, planned to ride out the storm in his condominium.

“I am getting a little concerned now,” Carducci said, as the water pitched and roared below. “But I’m staying.”

Sandy also wreaked havok with the nation’s busiest airspace. Airlines canceled more than 8,900 flights Sunday and Monday, and another 4,800 for Tuesday. Philadelphia International Airport, La Guardia Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport were hit particularly hard, and authorities warned that delays and cancellations could linger until early next week. Travel snarls were expected to ripple around the world, including Los Angeles, where dozens of flights were canceled.

“It keeps changing by the hour,” said Tricia Tinsley, 41, at Los Angeles International Airport. Tinsley was trying to get her mother home to Clinton, N.Y., before she ran out of diabetes medication. “We can’t leave her stranded in a city where she knows nobody.”

The storm derailed the presidential campaign just a week before the election, postponing early voting in some areas and causing President Obama and Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney to cancel campaign events. The president backed out of a scheduled rally in Orlando, Fla., to return to the White House situation room. He could be seen wincing into the wind and rain as he stepped onto the Tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland.

“This is going to be a big and powerful storm,’’ Obama said. “Millions of people are going to be affected. ... I am not worrying at this point about the impact on elections. Right now, our number one priority is to make sure we are saving lives.’’

Politics will come soon enough. Top officials at the Department of Homeland Security were receiving an unusual volume of calls from members of Congress eager to get their constituents reimbursed for storm damage and rescue efforts, according to an administration official who was not authorized to speak to the press. If the storm stays on its current track, it is projected to hit more than 168 congressional districts, the official said.

Sandy also sent hundreds of theatrical productions, film and television projects and cultural institutions into darkness.

In New York, Broadway was closed Monday – including scheduled performances of “Annie,” Chicago” and “Evita” – and most theaters will be closed on Tuesday as well. Performances at the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall and the Public Theater were canceled. Many of the country’s noted museums also closed – the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Production on New York-based television shows and feature films was interrupted – none more ironically than Russell Crowe’s “Noah,” a film about the biblical flood. Writer-director Darren Aronofsky’s production team had built two massive ships. One of them, a 450-foot-long “ark,” was docked in a small inlet on Long Island Sound, where one in 10 homes was without power four hours ahead of landfall.

Several talk shows also canceled production, including “The Colbert Report,” “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” which usually films in Los Angeles but had been scheduled to begin a week of heavily publicized shows from Brooklyn, Kimmel’s home borough.

tina.susman@latimes.com

david.zucchino@latimes.com

scott.gold@latimes.com

Susman reported from New York, Zucchino from Philadelphia and Gold from Los Angeles.

Staff writers Joseph Tanfani, Meredith Blake, Adolfo Flores, Kim Geiger, Hugo Martin, Michael Muskal, David Ng, Jim Puzzanghera, Alana Semuels, Joseph Serna, Richard Simon, and Richard Verrier contributed to this report.

People urged to stay clear of lakefront as Sandy makes waves here

People urged to stay clear of lakefront as Sandy makes waves here

Staff report

8:58 a.m. CDT, October 30, 2012

Chicago officials are urging people to stay away from the lakefront today as the superstorm pounding the Northeast whips up strong winds and high waves on Lake Michigan.

Chicago's Office of Emergency Management and Communications is warning that winds up to 60 mph could send waves as high as 25 feet crashing along the shoreline.

"Stay off the lake, folks," said Gary Schenkel, executive director of OEMC. "This could be a very dangerous situation."

As of 8 a.m., a buoy about 50 miles southeast of Milwaukee was recording waves of around 20 feet, according to Gino Izzi, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service. The highest waves recorded by the buoy, which does not operate in the winter, are 23 feet from last fall.

Izzi estimated waves reaching the lakefront were 17 to 20 feet high and could increase over the next five or six hours.

Winds were gusting at 34 mph at Northerly Island, 53 mph at the water intake crib three miles out into the lake, and 68 mph at Michigan City, Ind., according to Izzi.

The National Weather Service has issued a lakeshore flood warning for the Chicago area that went into effect at 1 a.m. today and will remain until 4 p.m. Wednesday. There is also a high wind warning from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. today for Lake and Porter counties in Indiana.

Chicago Park District officials closed the lakefront trail from North Avenue to Ohio Street Monday night and have also been securing beaches. The CTA is prepared to reroute buses as necessary, depending on the waves, Schenkel said. Throughout Tuesday, outdoor concessions on Navy Pier and the Ferris wheel will be closed.

For now, the city does not plan to close Lake Shore Drive, Schenkel said. "We do not want to close Lake Shore Drive," Schenkel said. "We're prepared to at any time should there be an event out there."

A spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard said no weather-related problems had been reported in Lake Michigan as of early Tuesday morning.

Airlines have canceled 340 flights out of Chicago today because of the storm, a day after 600 flights were scratched, according to the Chicago Department of Aviation.

At O'Hare International Airport, airlines canceled more than 270 flights to and from the East Coast today. At Midway Airport, airlines canceled nearly 70 flights.

On Monday, airlines canceled nearly 500 flights out of O'Hare and more than 100 flights from Midway.

chicagobreaking@tribune.com

Northeast Suffers Huge Damage in Storm’s Path; Millions Without Power

Northeast Suffers Huge Damage in Storm’s Path; Millions Without Power

By JAMES BARRON and J. DAVID GOODMAN

Published: October 30, 2012 154 Comments

As Hurricane Sandy churned inland as a downgraded storm, residents up and down the battered mid-Atlantic region woke on Tuesday to lingering waters, darkened homes and the daunting task of cleaning up from once-in-a-generation storm surges and their devastating effects.

Power remained out for roughly six million people, including a large swath of Manhattan. Early risers stepped out into debris-littered streets that remained mostly deserted as dawn shed light on the extent of the damage. Bridges remained closed, and seven subway tunnels under the East River were flooded. Other mass transit service, including commuter rails, was also still suspended.

A wind-tossed construction crane atop one of the tallest buildings in New York City still dangled 80 stories over West 57th Street, across the street from Carnegie Hall, after coming loose during the storm.

The storm was the most destructive in the 108-year history of New York’s subway system, said Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, in an early morning statement.

“We are assessing the extent of the damage and beginning the process of recovery,” he said, but did not provide a timetable for restoring transit service to a paralyzed city.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey called the damage to his state “incalculable” and said the Jersey Shore had been “devastated.” As he spoke on a series of morning talk shows on Tuesday, rescue teams were rushing to the aid of those stranded in Atlantic City and in areas of Bergen County where he said tidal waters had overwhelmed a protective natural berm.

At least 11 deaths — including 7 in the New York region — were tied to the storm, which toppled trees and sparked fires in several areas, state authorities said. Falling limbs became deadly bludgeons in three of the New York deaths and two in Morris County, N.J., where The Associated Press reported a man and a woman were killed when a tree fell on their car Monday evening.

The storm made landfall at 8 p.m. on Monday. Reclassified as a post-tropical cyclone, it weakened as it passed west across southern Pennsylvania, though it still packed maximum sustained winds of 65 miles per hour, the National Hurricane Center said. It was expected to turn north and head for Canada late on Tuesday.

The storm had picked up speed as it roared over the Atlantic Ocean on Monday, grinding life to a halt for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states, with extensive evacuations that turned shorefront neighborhoods into ghost towns.

Hurricane-force winds extended up to 175 miles from the center of the storm; tropical-storm-force winds spread out 485 miles from the center. Forecasters said tropical-storm-force winds could stretch all the way north to Canada and all the way west to the Great Lakes. Heavy snow was expected in some states.

Businesses and schools were closed, roads were closed, and more than 13,000 airline flights were canceled. Even the Erie Canal was shut down.

Subways were shut down from Boston to Washington, as were Amtrak and the commuter rail lines. Flights were canceled at airports across the East Coast, including the three major airports in the New York City area.

In Breezy Point on the Rockaways in Queens, nearly 200 firefighters were still battling a blaze on Tuesday morning that destroyed at least 50 tightly-packed homes in the beach community. A Fire Department spokesman said the area was “probably the most flooded part of the city, so there are all sorts of complications.”

The surging water also caused extensive complications at NYU Langone Medical Center when a backup power system failed on Monday night, forcing the evacuation of patients to other facilities. Backup power also failed at Coney Island Hospital in southern Brooklyn, though critical patients had been evacuated in advance of the storm.

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office said late Monday night that at least five deaths in the state were caused by the storm. About 7 p.m., a tree fell on a house in Queens, killing a 30-year-old man, the city police said. About the same time, two boys, ages 11 and 13, were killed in North Salem, in Westchester County, when a tree fell on the house they were in, according to the State Police. The storm was tied to another three deaths in Maryland, two in Connecticut and one in West Virginia, state authorities said.

The wind-driven rain lashed sea walls and protective barriers in places like Atlantic City, where the Boardwalk was damaged as water forced its way inland. Foam was spitting, and the sand gave in to the waves along the beach at Sandy Hook, N.J., at the entrance to New York Harbor. Water was thigh-high on the streets in Sea Bright, N.J., a three-mile sand-sliver of a town where the ocean joined the Shrewsbury River.

“It’s the worst I’ve seen,” said David Arnold, watching the storm from his home in Long Branch, N.J. “The ocean is in the road, there are trees down everywhere. I’ve never seen it this bad.”

As the storm struck the city, waves topped the sea wall in the financial district in Manhattan, sending cars floating down streets. West Street, along the western edge of Lower Manhattan, looked like a river. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel flooded “from end to end,” the transportation authority said, hours after Mr. Cuomo had ordered it closed to traffic. Officials said water also seeped into seven subway tunnels under the East River.

“In 108 years, our employees have never faced a challenge like the one that confronts us now,” Mr. Lhota, the transit authority chairman, said.

A replica of the H.M.S. Bounty, a tall ship built for the 1962 movie “Mutiny on the Bounty” starring Marlon Brando and used in the recent “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, sank off the North Carolina coast. The Coast Guard said the 180-foot three-masted ship went down near the Outer Banks after being battered by 18-foot-high seas and thrashed by 40 m.p.h. winds. The body of one crew member, Claudene Christian, 42, was recovered. Another crew member remained missing.

Delaware banned cars and trucks from state roadways other than “essential personnel.”

“The most important thing right now is for people to use common sense,” Gov. Jack A. Markell said. “We didn’t want people out on the road going to work and not being able to get home again.”

Extensive Power Failures

By early Monday evening, the storm had knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes, stores and office buildings. Consolidated Edison said that as of 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, 634,000 customers in New York City and Westchester 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.

In New Jersey, more than two million customers were without power as of 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, and in Connecticut the total reached nearly 500,000 customers.

President Obama declared a federal disaster area on Tuesday in New York City, Long Island and eight counties in New Jersey.

Forecasters attributed the power of the storm to a convergence of weather systems. As the hurricane swirled north in the Atlantic and then pivoted toward land, a wintry storm was heading toward it from the west, and cold air was blowing south from the Arctic. The hurricane left more than 60 people dead in the Caribbean before it began crawling toward the Northeast.

“The days ahead are going to be very difficult,” Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland said.

Alex Sosnowski, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather, said potentially damaging winds would continue on Tuesday from Illinois to the Carolinas — and as far north as Maine — as the storm barreled toward the eastern Great Lakes.

The storm headed toward land with weather that was episodic: a strong gust of wind one minute, then mist. More wind. Thin sheets of rain dancing down the street. Then, for a moment, nothing. The sky lightened. Then another blast of rain. Then more wind.

In some places, caravans of power-company trucks traveled largely empty roads; Public Service Electric and Gas said that 600 line workers and 526 tree workers had arrived from across the country, but could not start the repairs and cleanup until the wind had subsided, perhaps not until Wednesday.

They will see a landscape that, in many places, was remade by the storm. In Montauk, at the end of Long Island, a 50-seat restaurant broke in half. Half of the building floated away and broke into pieces on the beach.

The 110-foot-tall lighthouse at Montauk Point — the oldest in the state, opened in 1796 — shuddered in the storm despite walls that are six feet thick at the base. The lighthouse keeper, Marge Winski, said she had never felt anything like that in 26 years on the job.

“I went up in the tower and it was vibrating, it was shaking,” Ms. Winski said. “I got out of it real quick. I’ve been here through hurricanes, and nor’easters, but nothing this bad.”

Power Failures and Furious Flooding Overwhelm Lower Manhattan and Red Hook

Power Failures and Furious Flooding Overwhelm Lower Manhattan and Red Hook

By CARA BUCKLEY and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM

Published: October 29, 2012

With rapids-like fury, water piled out of New York Harbor on Monday night and flooded scores of city streets, venturing far deeper into neighborhoods than anyone could remember. Red Hook in Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan seemed to bear the brunt of the onslaught, though similar scenes unfolded in Queens and in Upper Manhattan.

On Tuesday morning, the waters had mostly receded in the two neighborhoods across the harbor from each other, and the most recent high tide came and went without breaching the sea walls. But numerous buildings had had their first floors and basements flooded and power was out.

In Red Hook, residents and business owners picked through their waterlogged possessions. On Van Brunt Street, residents pulled soggy mattresses onto the street. A half-foot of water still filled Beard Street, and portions of Pier 41, which is filled with businesses and artist studios, appeared to be gone.

“It’s a disaster,” said Greg O’Connell, whose father, also Greg, developed much of Red Hook in the late 1990s.

Just 12 hours earlier, with the waterfront already battered by hours of winds and powerful currents brought on by Hurricane Sandy, the East River rose over South Street and flooded into Wall Street, where cars were inundated — and some appeared to be floating. Their alarms went off with blaring klaxons and flashing lights until the water silenced the alarms. The rising tide lifted the old sailing ship Peking so high that its waterline was flush with the street.

At the Battery, the water level was at 10.7 feet as of 7:20 p.m., breaking the record of 10 feet set by Hurricane Donna in 1960.

Power was shut off in Lower Manhattan by Consolidated Edison officials who hoped underground equipment would fare better if it was shut down before it was swamped with the salty water. One by one, entire blocks went dark. Witnesses saw occasional bursts of orange flame and sparks: water hitting electrical lines. On West Houston Street, the Hudson River reached Greenwich Street. Further uptown, entire swaths of the West Side Highway were underwater, and the Fire Department said there was six feet of water at Second Avenue and 96th Street — a block from the East River.

West Street was a torrent of seawater smelling pungently of sewage, from the submerged Battery Park underpass north to the Freedom Tower. Nearly every window south of Liberty Street went dark. “The lights flickered and then they just went out at 7:35,” said Laura Dotolo, 40, a handbag designer who lives near Battery Park. She and her husband opted not to evacuate and would ride out the storm using candles and flashlights.

North and east, Avenue C was flooded with water pouring in from the East River. Cars could be seen floating south. Kori Burkholder, 40, a product marketing manager, watched the storm surge from her apartment, which also lost power. “It’s crazy, the whole avenue is flooded and the cars are 85 percent flooded,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

Police cars parked in front of the police precinct on East 7th Street were marooned, with water up to the windows. Water poured into the entryway of 384 East 10th Street, where the front door is a few steps below the sidewalk and the corridor inside the building was filled with water that looked two to three feet deep.

As striking and sudden as the floods were in Lower Manhattan, the black, brackish waters seemed to come on even faster in Red Hook, which has a water table so high that power and phone lines are positioned above ground; here the evening high tide came on with terrifying force.

In the morning, the harbor lapped a long pier and seeped toward the cobblestone streets, where a Civil War-era brick building had been converted to artists’ studios. The community falls almost entirely within Zone A, for which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ordered mandatory evacuations Sunday afternoon, and families with young children had mostly departed.

Throughout the day, the pioneer spirit that has brought chicken coops, beehives and funky bars to a once-desolate industrial stretch of Brooklyn was on full display, with residents hoisting Brooklyn Lager and goblets of red wine.

At Fort Defiance, a restaurant-bar where the biggest seller was the $10 Irish coffee, the owner, St. John Frizell, 39, was getting ready to haul some cases of wine and food up from the basement in preparation for the storm.

But not before topping off a patron’s glass of Chinon. “I’m so glad you’re open,” cooed the petite, bespectacled customer, to which Mr. Frizell replied, “Will you please tell my mother that?”

By 6 p.m., the water had already returned to the morning’s high tide level — but with two hours to go until evening high tide.

And then, around 7:30 p.m., it came rolling over the bulkheads and furiously raced down the streets. A caravan of trucks, including a utility truck from National Grid, careened down the streets just in front of the rushing waters, which quickly rose to the level of the fenders of parked trucks.

In the darkness brought on by the power failures, illuminated by the occasional sparking of falling overhead wires, the area around the popular ball fields became a lake. A few blocks away, a geyser of water gushed upward like a fountain from a storm sewer in Red Hook on Hicks Street, right by the Red Hook Public Houses. Near the Ikea on Beard Street, water had reached the half-story mark.

The main thoroughfare, Van Brunt Street, became a fast-moving river.

At 10 p.m., though high tide had passed, the waters showed little signs of receding. Nelson Toridio, 52, waded out ahead of his family of five — after the waters lapped the front steps of their apartment building, his wife insisted the family leave, so they did, in the cold waters, belongings held aloft as they made their way across Hamilton Avenue to their car.

Aristedes Valentine, 49, who lives in Red Hook housing, was worried about his car — others were underwater, up to their roofs. His girlfriend, who lives in another building, implored him not to go out. “It’s only a car,” she said. “It’s not worth risking your life.” But he went. He stepped outside, saw the downed power lines, and paused, in fear. Then he saw teenagers wading through, so he went, wading up to his thighs until he got to his prize Murano, which was safe. But his thighs were cramping from the cold and he was shivering. He should have evacuated, he conceded, “but now it’s too late.”

Late at night, Mr. Frizell, the owner of Fort Defiance, knew his restaurant was in bad shape. He knew Fort Defiance took water, he said, that water flooded the basement with its tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of compressors and other equipment. He relayed the bad news to fellow business owners in the area, who had evacuated but were anxiously awaiting news. “I’ve had to give a lot of bad news to people tonight,” he said.

Peter Waldman, a glassblower whose studio is across from the Fairway market, a block from the water, spent Monday gauging his safety in inches. He wanted to safeguard his studio and also his car — which he was now marooned in at the highest point of the street. He would have to wade through a foot of water to get to the studio, but he said that finally, around 10:15 p.m., the waters were beginning to recede.

Limited bus service to return at 5 p.m., trains still shuttered

Limited bus service to return at 5 p.m., trains still shuttered

By JENNIFER FERMINO

Last Updated: 12:39 PM, October 30, 2012

The MTA will begin running limited bus service tonight at 5 p.m. and begin operating on a full schedule by tomorrow, Gov. Cuomo announced today.

Wednesday’s buses will run on a Sunday schedule.

There will be no fares on any of the buses for the time being to help the region recover from the storm, he said.

Restorations of subway service, however, remains unclear.

Officials said the underground tunnels suffered extensive flooding, and it could be up to five days before full service is restored.

Cuomo said it’s possible the subways will come up bit by bit.

The governor also said that the Brooklyn Battery and Holland Tunnels will remain closed due to flooding.

The Outerbridge Crossing, George Washington, Goethals and Bayonne bridges have been reopened, according to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. However, all motorists are urged to avoid driving unless absolutely necessary.

Kennedy Airport will likely reopen Wednesday but LaGuardia won’t because it suffered extensive damage.

He said President Obama called him and he “told him the major problem was the flooding of the tunnels.”

He also told Obama “We have a 100 year flood every two years now.”

The one bit of good news was that no subway cars or buses were damaged by the storm because they were all moved beforehand.

Gov. Christie: 'level of devastation at the Jersey shore is unthinkable;' search and rescue underway

Gov. Christie: 'level of devastation at the Jersey shore is unthinkable;' search and rescue underway

From POST STAFF REPORT

Last Updated: 11:06 AM, October 30, 2012

Gov. Chris Christie provided an update on the “devastation” Sandy unleashed on New Jersey.

“There are houses in the middle of Route 35,” he said, describing the damage to the Jersey shore. “The level of devastation at the Jersey shore is unthinkable.”

He said even though the rain has tapered it off it far too dangerous for homeowners to return to the barrier islands to assess the damage

“We need to remain patient, let the waters recede and then go in and get a full assessment,” he said. “It is a devastating sight right now. The devastation that happened in New Jersey is beyond what happened anywhere else. The devastation is unprecedented, like nothing we have ever seen.”

He said the recovery could take longer than Hurricane Irene.

“We need to keep that in mind in terms of gauging our expectations.”

Gov. Chris Christie warned that getting to and from Manhattan will be difficult via mass transit.

“I would not look for the PATH system to be operating anytime in the near feature, at least 7 or 10 days. My guess, people will have to rely on the ferry system to get back and forth into Manhattan much like we saw after 9/11.”

He added, that “NJ Transit, I think will be less compromised than the PATH system,” but could provide no timetable.

Christie also said he is suffering from a cold.

Rescue operations were under way from one end of New Jersey to the other Tuesday morning, hours after a powerful storm ripped through.

At least three people died from the storm, and authorities were rescuing residents of a small Bergen County community after a huge swell of water overflowed a barrier, stranding people on roofs in a trailer park.

A portion of the Atlantic City Boardwalk was destroyed by the pounding surf, and 2.3 million people were without electricity, many in flooded communities. One hospital evacuated, sending dozens of patients elsewhere.

And federal officials were keeping a close eye on the nation's oldest nuclear power plant, which suffered power outages, declared an alert due to rising water levels and lost a portion of its warning alarm system overnight.

"We are in the midst of urban search and rescue; our teams are moving as fast and as safe as they can," Christie said.

Authorities in Moonachie began a rescue effort after a huge swell of water flooded the town. Police Sgt. Tom Schmidt said the rush of water put about 5 feet of water in the streets within 45 minutes.

The police and fire departments were themselves flooded. They were using boats to try to rescue about 800 people living in a trailer park and other stranded residents. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

In Atlantic City, which remained flooded Tuesday morning, several blocks of the Boardwalk — the first in the nation — were destroyed by the storm. But a majority of it remained intact.

Carol Mason returned to her bay front home in Atlantic City on Tuesday morning to find it sodden from floodwaters that washed through overnight. The carpets squished as she stepped on them; cans of beer and soda she had stored on the porch had washed inside the house.

She had just made the final mortgage payment on the house last week.

"Oh my God," she exclaimed. "I have insurance, but..." she said, her voice trailing off.

Mason initially tried to ride out the storm, despite a mandatory evacuation order. But looking out a bathroom window, she saw the bay waters rapidly rising, and re-thought that plan.

"I looked at the bay and saw the fury in it," she said. "I knew it was time to go."

Kim Johnson was another one who tried to stay during the storm. When the front door to her home blew off Monday afternoon, she fled.

"It's just stuff," the nursing student said of her ruined possessions. "That will be fine. It's the near-term things I'm more concerned about, like how I'm going to get to class."

Also Tuesday, officials were evacuating the Palisades Medical Center in North Bergen, sending 51 patients, including new mothers and babies, to Hackensack University Medical Center.

Palisades Medical Center sustained power problems due to the storm, hospital officials said. Even though generator power was restored, officials feared the situation was too unstable.

The Garden State Parkway was reopened to traffic Tuesday, but more than 200 other state roads remained closed, many of them inaccessible due to fallen trees and downed power wires.

Major flooding had hit Toms River, and several people were trapped on upper floors of their homes near Barnegat Bay.

Jersey City closed the city to vehicles because traffic lights were out, and Hoboken was dealing with major flooding as well.

The barrier island of Ocean City was cut off from the mainland by the storm; an estimated 2,000 people had no way on or off the island during the storm.

The pounding surf also caused major beach erosion along New Jersey's 127-mile coast. Beach-related tourism is a major part of the state's $35.5 billion tourism industry.

The surf spilled over boardwalks in many shore towns, including Seaside Heights, home of MTV's infamous "Jersey Shore" reality series.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission was keeping a close eye on the Oyster Creek Nuclear Generating Station in Lacey Township, which had to declare an alert Monday night due to rising water levels in its canal that provides cooling water to the plant's intake system. The plant had been offline for refueling when the storm hit.

The NRC said the plant remains "in a safe condition" and said inspectors were on site. In addition, due to the power outages, Oyster Creek also lost 21 of its warning sirens.

The Lincoln Tunnel was open, but the Holland Tunnel remained closed. The George Washington Bridge, Goethals Bridge, Bayonne Bridge and Outerbridge Crossing all remained closed Tuesday morning, but all Delaware River Port Authority toll crossings reopened to traffic Tuesday morning.

Power out for hundreds of thousands around area, may take days to restore

Power out for hundreds of thousands around area, may take days to restore

From POST STAFF REPORT

Last Updated: 11:19 AM, October 30, 2012

Power was out for hundreds of thousands around the area after Hurricane Sandy slammed into the region.

Con Edison reported early this morning that at least 650,000 homes in New York and Westchester were in the dark.

As of 1 a.m. Tuesday, Con Ed had the number of customers without power in Manhattan was 193,000. At the height of the storm, at least 250,000 in Manhattan were powerless, most were below 39th Street.

"This will be one for the record books," said John Miksad, senior VP of electric operations. "This will be the largest storm related outage in our history."

At least 158,000 home in Westchester County were in the dark; 74,000 in Queens; 71,000 in Brooklyn; 76,000 in Staten Island; and 38,000 in the Bronx.

The storm left more than half of Long Islanders without power as 650,000 people had outages as of 8 p.m. last night.

By comparison 200,000 customers down for Irene.

The tide at the Battery was expected to be 10-12 feet but it reached 14 feet instead.

The planned outages from three preemptive shutdowns caused 34,000 outages in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan and could take three to four days to restore.

At least 75 flooded houses burn as blaze rages in Breezy Point

At least 75 flooded houses burn as blaze rages in Breezy Point

By LARRY CELONA

Last Updated: 9:07 AM, October 30, 2012

The fire raging in flooded Breezy Point, Queens, lights up the horizon.

A fire has destroyed at least 75 homes in a flooded neighborhood in Queens.

A fire department spokesman says more than 190 firefighters are at the blaze in the Rockaway/Breezy Point section. He says two people have suffered minor injuries.

Officials say the blaze was reported around 11 p.m. Monday in an area flooded by the superstorm that began sweeping through the city earlier.

The neighborhood sits on the Rockaway peninsula jutting into the Atlantic Ocean.

Over 30 cops were stranded trying to respond to the blaze. About 18 cops were stuck on barrier truck after trying to help people who were stranded in the area.

A source said the biggest problem for rescue crews was that there were not police or fire motorboats. Officials only had row boats, which were useless in the raging storm.

A nearby Howard Beach woman drowned because she was unable to get to the second floor, police said.

Power fails at NYU hospital, 200 patients evacuate

Power fails at NYU hospital, 200 patients evacuate

From AP

Last Updated: 6:31 AM, October 30, 2012

Medical workers assist a patient into an ambulance during an evacuation of New York University's Tisch Hospital.

A backup generator failed at a New York City hospital Monday night, forcing it to move out more than 200 patients, including 20 babies from neonatal intensive care.

Dozens of ambulances lined up around the block outside New York University Tisch Hospital as doctors and nurses began the slow process of evacuation. They started with the sickest and youngest. Some were on respirators operating on battery power.

"It's a challenging situation," NYU Medical Dean Robert Grossman told WCBS-TV. "We drill all the time for this kind of thing. But this isn't a drill. This is the real thing."

Much of New York was plunged into darkness by superstorm Sandy, a monstrous hybrid system that swept across a huge swath of the East.

Most of the power outages in lower Manhattan, where Tisch is located, were due to an explosion at an electrical substation, officials at Consolidated Edison said. It wasn't clear whether flooding or flying debris caused the explosion, said John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Con Edison.

Without power, there are no elevators, meaning patients — some of whom are being treated for cancer and other serious illnesses — must be carefully carried down staircases, Grossman said.

As the patients were evacuated, gusts of wind blew their blankets. Nurses and staff huddled around the patients, some holding IVs and other equipment.

Ambulances came from around the city to help transport the sick. Patients will be taken to other hospitals including Mount Sinai and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer.

The dark night: City’s bright lights bow to Sandy

The dark night: City’s bright lights bow to Sandy

By DAVID SEIFMAN, ERIN CALABRESE and SALLY GOLDENBERG

Last Updated: 4:19 AM, October 30, 2012

GLOOMSDAY: The eerie darkness of lower Manhattan is punctuated by the dazzling lights of the under-construction “Freedom Tower” last night in a chilling view from Brooklyn

Vast swaths of the city’s spectacular skyline went dark last night as ferocious winds and the sea surge from deadly Hurricane Sandy battered the city.

A quarter-million customers lost power in Manhattan alone.

“Most of Manhattan below 39th Street is out,” said Con Ed spokesman Chris Olert, adding that there was no timetable for getting the lights back on.

But the top of the Empire State Building remained lit, glowing amid its darkened neighbors.

Many took to the streets.

“It’s not too often you get to see the city dark,” said Greg Pearl, 26, an accountant who was taking pictures on the East Side.

A group staying at the Affinia Gardens hotel, which lost power, were told to stay in their rooms. So they bolted en masse to check out the suddenly medieval-looking city.

“We’re going to roam the city because I was never in a hurricane before,” said Susan Stubel, 42, visiting from Los Angeles.

A deafening “boom” was heard in the East Village near a power facility on the FDR facing the East River — and then the lights went out.

“Con Edison is reporting power outages to a large section of Manhattan stretching from East 39th Street to the lower tip of Manhattan,” the utility said in a statement. “The outage was caused by flooding in company substations and engineers are working to correct the problem.”

“I haven’t seen lower Manhattan shut down before. It’s kind of amusing,” said Jonathan Lee, 25, who walked across the Williamsburg Bridge with a buddy.

“It’s like an apocalypse, like a movie,” said his pal, Paul Parhar.

A high-voltage feeder on 14th Street was knocked out, Con Ed confirmed. “When feeders go out they can be real loud,” said a utility source.

“It was scary!” said Maritza Mercado, 40, on East 6th Street. “I was watching TV, looked outside the window and heard a big explosion and saw a big flash of white light like a firecracker.”

The utility also reported that a storm surge downtown caused a substation equipment failure affecting more than 60,000 customers throughout lower Manhattan and Greenwich Village — including at Con Ed’s headquarters.

Some 50,000 New Yorkers were already without power when lower Manhattan went dark.

But it wasn’t bad for everyone.

“I think it’s fantastic,” said Rachel Lindover, 21. “It actually feels like nighttime. For a city that doesn’t sleep, it’s finally sleeping.”

Hurri-crane: Luxe high-rise crisis forces evacuations

Hurri-crane: Luxe high-rise crisis forces evacuations

By BILL SANDERSON , REUVEN FENTON and BETH DEFALCO

Last Updated: 10:31 AM, October 30, 2012

A crane dangling precariously from the top of a luxury high-rise under construction near Carnegie Hall forced the evacuation of hundreds of residents and hotel guests yesterday.

Cops closed off all streets surrounding One57, at 157 W. 57th St., and the evacuations sent people out into the wind and rain.

By Tuesday morning, the site had become a pseudo tourist attraction. By mid-morning there didn't appear to be crews at the site.

“There’s not a lot holding that down,” said a construction worker who rushed to the scene just before 3 p.m. “Just rocking like that is going to wear down the metal.”

Gas and water was shut off in the area in case the boom collapsed.

“With the winds as they are, we just cannot secure it,” Mayor Bloomberg said. Engineers will probably have to build another crane to lift the one that’s falling, he added.

Hours after the accident, nearly two dozen “refugee” tourists evacuated from the posh Le Parker Meridien hotel, some with kids, were still wandering the streets looking for rooms.

“We don’t know where to go,” said one visitor from France.

A manager at the Salisbury Hotel on West 57th Street said about 500 guests had to leave — with no place to go.

“We are about 200 feet away [from the crane], and we are concerned,” the manager said.

Phil Wilcock, 50, who was visiting from England, said, “We just went out for lunch and are now being told we can’t go back on the street. because a crane just collapsed”

The crane was inspected Friday in anticipation of the storm.

The mayor said it’s “conceivable” that “a strange gust of wind” was responsible. “Just because it was inspected it doesn’t mean God doesn’t do anything,” Bloomberg said.

When completed, the 90-story One57 will be the city’s tallest residential building, a haven to the uber-rich, with a full-floor apartment selling for $50 million, sources said.

The building’s developer, Lend Lease — which changed its name from Bovis Lend Lease after avoiding indictment in the 2007 Deutsche Bank blaze that killed two city firemen— is responsible for the safety of the crane, owned by Pinnacle Industries.

Earlier this year, Lend Lease had to fork over $56 million in a massive criminal billing-fraud settlement.

Gary Barnett, president of building owner Extel, said, “Sorry, I can’t speak now,” before hanging up on a reporter.

The site has a slew of complaints for building dating back to last May, many to do with the crane, records show.

A stop-work order was issued on the crane in August because of hydraulic leaks and a defective hoist. The order was lifted and Pinnacle was fined. “I don’t know what they are going to do now — they can do nothing.”

The One57 site has been hit with several complaints for building violations, records show. Inspectors issued a stop-work order on the crane because of hydraulic leaks and a defective hoist wire found on Aug. 29. Also, inspectors found that Pinnacle did not have daily and monthly inspection records on the crane available at the work site.

The stop-work order was lifted until Sept. 10; Pinnacle paid a $1,600 fine for the fluid leaks. On Sept. 21, oil from the crane leaked into a nearby building, according to safety inspector’s report. In April, two pieces of shoring fell to a scaffold when a piece at the end of the crane cable came loose. In May, a panel being hoisted by the crane swung out of control and cracked a 10th-floor window., records show.

On March 14, the city got a complaint that the crane was illegally hoisting beams over a sidewalk. Buildings inspectors found nothing illegal happening when they got to the site.

And in February, building inspectors said they issued a violation against the crane operator for failing to report an accident.

Additional reporting by Sally Goldeberg and Kathryn Cusma

Floodites defy city & take their chances

Floodites defy city & take their chances

By LORENA MONGELLI, LEONARD GREENE and RICH CALDER

Last Updated: 4:29 AM, October 30, 2012

Stubborn New Yorkers in evacuation zones were hunkering down in their homes yesterday even as Hurricane Sandy began doing everything forecasters said it would do.

“I didn’t leave last year, I’m not leaving this year,” said Desmond Farrell, 32, a carpenter who ignored evacuation warnings in the Great Kills section of Staten Island.

“It’s never as bad as they say. Last year during Hurricane Irene, me and my friend went rafting around the neighborhood. We plan to do it again. It’s fun.”

It wasn’t fun for homeowner Joyce Adamiszyn, 57, who lives a half-block from Jamaica Bay on West 17th Road in Broad Channel. Her day started with water rising three feet before the tide pulled back.

“Me and my husband are staying put,” Adamiszyn said, hours before the next high tide.

“I’ve lived on this block for 57 years. You make your decision and hope for the best. I’d rather stay here and save something rather than going away and having no idea what I’ll be coming back to.”

Mayor Bloomberg continued to urge the 375,000 people in the coastal evacuation zones to leave their homes, including 45,000 who live in public housing.

He said that 76 emergency shelters in city public schools are taking people with their pets.

But he warned that the evacuation window was closing.

“You should have left, but it’s also getting to be too late to leave,” the mayor said. “You can look outside and say, ‘Oh, this is not bad.’ That’s correct, but it is going to be.”

In Rockaway Park, resident Sheila Ray vowed to ride out the storm — even though she lives a half-block from the beach. She left her car parked in Brooklyn, but she refused to leave the danger zone.

“It’s pretty bad out there, but we decided to stay put,” Ray said. “I live on the second floor so I’m not really worried. I’m just worried about flooding.”

“My wife wants to leave. She’s panicking,” said Greg Bruno, 43, a Staten Island mechanic from low-lying Eltingville.

“We’ll leave if the water starts coming into the house. My parents live three blocks away. I can live in the woods, I’m not worried. Granted, if you can’t take care of yourself you should get the hell out. Everybody seems to have already left.”

Not only was Jose Pozo planning to stay in his Red Hook evacuation-zone apartment, but he was riding his bike around the neighborhood and taking in the stormy sights.

“This is a once-in-a-lifetime storm,” said Pozo, 43. “We may never see anything like this again over here.”

Although officials said there would be no legal penalties for ignoring evacuation orders, residents in one housing complex said they were being threatened by cops.

“A cop told me if they catch us not evacuating, it’s a misdemeanor,” said Manuel Rosado, 60, who lives in the Alfred E. Smith Houses on the Lower East Side.

Facade is ‘blown off’ in Chelsea

Facade is ‘blown off’ in Chelsea

By ERIN CALABRESE and REBECCA HARSHBARGER

Last Updated: 6:31 AM, October 30, 2012

A four-story apartment building in Chelsea partially collapsed yesterday as winds gusted to more than 50 mph.

The front facade on the top floors of the building, on Eighth Avenue near West 15th Street, fell off, completely exposing the rooms inside.

One firefighter suffered minor injuries, the FDNY said.

A tourist staying in the building said she first noticed pieces falling from the ceiling.

“It’s an old building. It creaks and things, so initially we didn’t think anything was going on,” said the tourist, Natasha Stelmaszek, 56, of Seattle.

She went outside to take a look at the building, which has a business on the first floor, and noticed a crack. OFF THE WALL: Firefighters survey the damage last night at a Chelsea apartment building whose facade slid off amid Sandy’s high-speed winds.

“I decided to go upstairs to the fourth floor and then down to the second to let everyone know,” she said.

“And as a group, we just figured it was time to get out.”

Isabelle Boussard, visiting from France, said she and her family packed their bags and crossed the street.

“Ten minutes later, we watched it fall. It was crazy. It’s a very bad trip,” she said.

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn surveyed the damage. She told NY1 that all the tenants were tourists and that she was going to check whether it was an illegal hotel.

A call to the Department of Buildings and the building’s owner were not immediately returned.

The building has had numerous violations, including one in August for doing a two-story extension without a permit.

Northeast Suffers Huge Damage in Storm’s Path; Millions Without Power

Northeast Suffers Huge Damage in Storm’s Path; Millions Without Power

Roughly six million people, including many in a large swath of Manhattan, were without electricity. Streets were littered with debris and buildings damaged. Seven subway tunnels under the East River were flooded. While several bridges over the East River were set to reopen, other mass transit service, including commuter rails, was still suspended.

At least 26 deaths in seven states were tied to the storm, which toppled trees and sparked fires in several areas, government officials and emergency authorities said. Falling limbs became deadly bludgeons in three of the New York deaths and two in Morris County, N.J., where The Associated Press reported a man and a woman were killed when a tree fell on their car Monday evening.

There were at least 10 killed in New York City alone, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Tuesday, adding that some were killed when stepping in a puddle where a power line had fallen or when a tree fell onto a house.

“We had a storm of unprecedented proportions,” he said in a news conference.

Mr. Bloomberg said that schools would remain closed for a third day on Wednesday and that the authorities would try to restore subway service in about four days, but he did not provide an exact timetable.

By sending brackish water into so many subway tunnels, the storm became the most destructive in the 108-year history of New York’s subway system, said Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, in an early morning statement. “We are assessing the extent of the damage and beginning the process of recovery,” he said.

As the storm made its way across the Atlantic this week, the authorities ordered mandatory evacuations in many low-lying areas of states along the coast to clear residents from the anticipated surge and powerful winds. At one point, hurricane-force winds extended up to 175 miles from the center of the storm; tropical-storm-force winds spread out 485 miles from the center.

When it made landfall at 8 p.m. on Monday, its violent winds and lashing rains began to transform city landscapes into tableaus of destruction in the region. By Tuesday morning in New York City, one of the most dramatic scenes was 80 stories high, where a wind-tossed construction crane atop one of the city’s tallest buildings still dangled over West 57th Street, across the street from Carnegie Hall, after coming loose during the storm.

Forecasters tracked the storm’s path in a shift well to the west, with the prediction models suggesting it wouldl run up through central Pennsylvania and western New York State and to enter southern Ontario by Wednesday, said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

Rain levels are expected to diminish as the storm continues to move inland and loses contact with the ocean — its source of moisture — though wind damage is still likely across a broad stretch of the country, Mr. Blake said. “You’ve got rain or snow extending from Georgia through Maine and Michigan,” he said. “When you have something over Pennsylvania, and Lake Michigan is seeing gale-force winds, you’ve got a very large storm.”

Forecasters said tropical-storm-force winds could stretch all the way north to Canada and all the way west to the Great Lakes. Heavy snow was expected in some states.

More than 13,000 airline flights were canceled at airports across the East Coast, including the three major airports in the New York City area. Even the Erie Canal was shut down. Subways were shut down from Boston to Washington, as were Amtrak and the commuter rail lines.

In Breezy Point on the Rockaways in Queens, nearly 200 firefighters were still battling a blaze on Tuesday morning that destroyed about 80 tightly packed homes in the beach community. A Fire Department spokesman said the area was “probably the most flooded part of the city, so there are all sorts of complications.”

The surging water also caused extensive complications at NYU Langone Medical Center when a backup power system failed on Monday night, forcing the evacuation of patients to other facilities. Backup power also failed at Coney Island Hospital in southern Brooklyn, though critical patients had been evacuated in advance of the storm.

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office said late Monday night that at least five deaths in the state were caused by the storm. About 7 p.m., a tree fell on a house in Queens, killing a 30-year-old man, the city police said. About the same time, two boys, ages 11 and 13, were killed in North Salem, in northern Westchester County, when a tree fell on the house they were in, according to the State Police. The storm was tied to another three deaths in Maryland, two in Connecticut and one in West Virginia, state authorities said.

Officials for Pennsylvania said two deaths — a boy in Susquehanna County and a 62-year-old man in Berks County, were being investigated but that the county coroner had not yet confirmed them as related to the storm. In North Carolina, a man was killed when his vehicle hit a tree that was crashing down in Surry Couty, said an official with the state emergency offices.

The wind-driven rain lashed sea walls and protective barriers in places like Atlantic City, where the Boardwalk was damaged as water forced its way inland. Foam was spitting, and the sand gave in to the waves along the beach at Sandy Hook, N.J., at the entrance to New York Harbor.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey called the damage to his state “incalculable” and said the Jersey Shore had been “devastated.” As he spoke on a series of morning talk shows on Tuesday, rescue teams were rushing to the aid of those stranded in Atlantic City and in areas of Bergen County where, he said, tidal waters had overwhelmed a protective natural berm.

Water was thigh-high on the streets in Sea Bright, N.J., a three-mile sand-sliver of a town where the ocean joined the Shrewsbury River.

“It’s the worst I’ve seen,” said David Arnold, watching the storm from his home in Long Branch, N.J. “The ocean is in the road, there are trees down everywhere. I’ve never seen it this bad.”

As the storm struck New York City, waves topped the sea wall in the financial district in Manhattan, sending cars floating down streets. West Street, along the western edge of Lower Manhattan, looked like a river. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel flooded “from end to end,” the transportation authority said, hours after Mr. Cuomo had ordered it closed to traffic. Officials said water also seeped into seven subway tunnels under the East River.

Extensive Power Failures

By early Monday evening, the storm had knocked out power to hundreds of thousands of homes, stores and office buildings. Consolidated Edison said that as of 1:30 a.m. Tuesday, 634,000 customers in New York City and Westchester 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, affecting about 250,000 customers. Later, an explosion at a Con Ed substation on East 14th Street knocked out power to another 250,000 customers.

Much of Manhattan could be without electricity for several days after the explosion, a spokesman for Con Ed said Tuesday morning. More than 240,000 customers – and many more people – were without power more than 12 hours after the explosion; a customer can represent a single family or an entire building, utility officials said.

The blast knocked out electricity for all of Manhattan below 39th Street on the East Side and 31st Street on the West side – with the exception of a few pockets, including Battery Park City.

In New Jersey, more than two million customers were without power as of 1:30 a.m. on Tuesday, and in Connecticut the total reached nearly 500,000 customers.

President Obama declared a federal disaster area on Tuesday in New York City, Long Island and eight counties in New Jersey.

Forecasters attributed the power of the storm to a convergence of weather systems. As the hurricane swirled north in the Atlantic and then pivoted toward land, a wintry storm was heading toward it from the west, and cold air was blowing south from the Arctic. The hurricane left more than 60 people dead in the Caribbean before it began crawling toward the Northeast.

“The days ahead are going to be very difficult,” Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland said.

Alex Sosnowski, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather, said potentially damaging winds would continue on Tuesday from Illinois to the Carolinas — and as far north as Maine — as the storm barreled toward the eastern Great Lakes.

Power outages from Hurricane Sandy climb as most of N.J. is still in the dark

Power outages from Hurricane Sandy climb as most of N.J. is still in the dark

Bobby Olivier/The Star-Ledger By Bobby Olivier/The Star-Ledger

on October 30, 2012 at 11:21 AM, updated October 30, 2012 at 12:03 PM

The news keeps getting worse.

As of 10:30 a.m., 2.6 million New Jersey utility customers were still without power — nearly two-thirds of the state. The total has climbed slightly from earlier this morning, adding another 100,000 customers or so to the growing number.

And the lights may not be coming back for a while.

In Edison, which was hit hard by power outages Monday night, Public Service Electric & Gas informed residents that their power would be restored by Nov. 5.

“This storm had both strong winds and long, sustained winds,” Paul Rosengren, a spokesman for the parent company of PSE&G. “It's the combination of the two that makes this the most devastating storm in company history.”

PSE&G president Ralph Izzo said repairs won't be easy.

"This is going to be a slow, painstaking process, folks," Izzo said. "We are absolutely adamant that the safety of our team and our customers is first and foremost."

POWER OUTAGE UPDATES

• PSE&G: 1,459,000 homes and businesses

• JCP&L: 961,000 homes and businesses

• ATLANTIC CITY: 187,000 homes and businesses

• TOTAL: 2.6 million homes and businesses (as of 10:30 a.m.)

Here are the PSE&G breakdowns by county, according to the company's website.

• Bergen County: 232,000 homes and businesses

• Burlington County: 70,000 homes and businesses

• Camden County: 28,000 homes and businesses

• Essex County: 251,000 homes and businesses

• Gloucester County: 1,000 homes and businesses

• Hudson County: 228,000 homes and businesses

• Mercer County: 85,000 homes and businesses

• Middlesex County: 216,000 homes and businesses

• Monmouth County: 2,000 homes and businesses

• Passaic County: 89,000 homes and businesses

• Somerset County: 79,000 homes and businesses

• Union County: 178,000 homes and businesses

Hurricane Sandy reminds weather historians of 1821 in N.J.

Hurricane Sandy reminds weather historians of 1821 in N.J.

Amy Ellis Nutt/The Star-Ledger By Amy Ellis Nutt/The Star-Ledger

on October 30, 2012 at 7:30 AM, updated October 30, 2012 at 7:31 AM

High tides topped dunes and spilled into the first floors of buildings, sending rivers of debris streaming down city streets.

Roofs shredded, chimneys severed and houses were unmoored from their foundations. Broken window glass sliced the air making it unsafe to walk outside and furious wind gusts scooped up ocean water and blew it dozens of miles inland.

One eyewitness said "limbs of trees were flying in every direction."

The hurricane wasn’t Sandy, but "The Great September Gale" of 1821, one of more than 50 extreme tropical storms or hurricanes either to graze or hit the Garden State in the past 270 years, according to the American Meteorological Society. But like Sandy, the 1821 hurricane was a rare event, widely considered by weather historians to be the last intense hurricane to make landfall in the Garden State in 350 years, and only the second in 700 years, according to the geological record.

On Sept. 3, 1821 there were no meteorologists and no weather forecasts beyond the annual Old Farmer’s Almanac. So when a violent storm moved from North Carolina’s Outer Banks and to Cape May in less than 10 hours, striking New Jersey as a Category 4 hurricane, fisherman, farmers and their families fled to the highest point they could find — the lighthouse -- according to newspaper accounts at the time.

Also known as the Norfolk and Long Island Hurricane for its track from Virginia to New York, the Great September Gale of 1821 roared up the Garden State and through the Pinelands, according to the book "Great Storms of the Jersey Shore." There it sheared away an entire forest of cedar trees, some of them 300 years old, and destroyed many freshwater lakes. The 200-mph gusts were felt as far away as Philadelphia, said historians who have chronicled the era, and by the time the hurricane’s eye passed over New York, a 13-foot tidal surge pushed the waters of the East and Hudson rivers together, submerging the southern tip of Manhattan as far north as Canal Street.

The similarities to Sandy have not gone unnoticed.

"The National Hurricane Center said this storm is likely the worst-case scenario," said Mike Tidwell, director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network, "You can definitely compare that to 1821, which cut New York in two."

Before Sandy made landfall Monday evening, the eye of only one hurricane, the 1821 storm, has ever passed directly over the state, according to several weather historians. The observations of one eyewitness to that nineteenth century behemoth were recorded in New York’s Evening Post:

"One vessel was found bottom upwards. A hole was cut, a woman taken out … One chimney blew over against an adjoining store and when the wind shifted (it) blew back again and stood erect as usual … The force of the wind was so great that the spray of the salt water was carried 12 to 124 miles inland. Leaves of orchard trees on the side toward the ocean were turned brown and appeared as if scorched and dead, while on the other side the leaves were green and beautiful."

Another account said debris was lodged in treetops nine feet high and the Newark Sentinel of Freedom reported white-capped waves replaced orchards and cornfields.

A century and a half later, New Jersey researchers calculated the hurricane had likely ground its way northward at about 50 mph, and when the Garden State Parkway was being built in 1954 crews uncovered many of the trees knocked down that day that were then buried and preserved in the oxygen-free mud and marshland.

"The 1821 is the standard hurricane for the Jersey shore," said Rick Schwartz, author of "Hurricanes and the Middle Atlantic States" and a native of Passaic. "because it’s the only one. Of course, other individual storms have been worse."

One of them, Schwartz said, was the 1903 hurricane, although by the time it crashed into New Jersey it was more tropical storm than hurricane, with winds along the shore of about 70 mph — four short of hurricane status.

The storm was dubbed the "Vagabond Hurricane" for the media circus it engendered, with one New York newspaper offering to raise $200,000 to a survivor with a good tale to tell. The only damage, however, was mostly to boardwalk pavilions and the press went home decidedly underwhelmed — but with their reward money still in hand.

The Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 never made landfall in New Jersey, but as a Category 4 hurricane sitting just 25 to 50 miles off the Mid-Atlantic shore, it sent devastating waves rocketing over the sand dunes and boardwalk, causing damage up and down New Jersey’s 127-mile-long coastline.

According to an eyewitness in Atlantic City, the waves "picked up the entire Boardwalk off its concrete supports as far as I could see in either direction, tossed it over backwards, and crushed it like you’d crush toothpicks."

Eighteen years later, the Ash Wednesday storm of March 6-8, 1962, again ripped away Atlantic City’s steel pier, destroyed nearly the entire boardwalk and shredded Long Beach Island. More than 4,000 buildings and homes were damaged and 14 people died.

"Ash Wednesday had similarities to this. It delivered hurricane-force gusts along the coast," said Schwartz. The pressure exploded off the coast. And the pressure now is deepening like crazy … While the 1821 hurricane was likely more destructive along the Jersey shore, this will likely be more destructive for the entire state."

When Hurricane Hazel powered up the East Coast in 1954 it killed 95 people, set rainfall records in the Carolinas and wind speed records in Washington, D.C. and New York City.

In September 1999 Hurricane Floyd, which stalled off Jersey’s coast, caused the first large-scale peacetime evacuation in U.S. history, involving more than 3 million people from Florida to North Carolina. New Jersey’s flood damage was mostly inland, along the Raritan and other rivers, and cost between $4.5 and $6 billion.

On June 1 this year, Schwartz posted a press release for his book on his website that carried the following headline:

"History Suggests That 2012 Will Bring ‘The Big One’ Hurricane to the Mid-Atlantic States."

Yesterday, Schwartz said he wasn’t surprised.

"The state has been way overdue, particularly along the Atlantic Coast," he said. "The most recent hurricane to affect the whole Mid-Atlantic was 1985 — Gloria. It’s usually once every 10 years and it’s been 27."

Still, Schwartz is astounded at the scope and power of Sandy, not to mention its timing.

"It’s extremely rare this far north this late, and the direction and strength may be unprecedented," he said. "My research went back 400 years … There have been individual storms that have been worse on the coast like Ash Wednesday, and with higher wind like Hazel and more rainfall like Floyd. But I really can’t think of a storm quite like this — inland flooding, coastal flooding, wind. This is the whole package."

Amy Ellis Nutt: (973) 392-1794 or anutt@starledger.com

Sandy leaves unprecedented challenges for New York City subways

Sandy leaves unprecedented challenges for New York City subways

Reuters

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The giant storm Sandy wreaked havoc on the New York City subway system, flooding tunnels, garages and rail yards and threatening to paralyze the nation's largest mass-transit system for days.

"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," Joseph Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, said in a statement early on Tuesday.

He later said that water was "literally up to the ceiling" at one downtown station.

All seven subway tunnels running under the East River from Manhattan to Queens and Brooklyn took in water, and any resulting saltwater damage to the system's electrical components will have to be cleaned - in some cases off-site - before the system can be restored, MTA spokeswoman Deirdre Parker said on Tuesday.

At dawn, emergency crews were assessing the damage to tunnels and elevated tracks. Restoring the system is likely to be a gradual process, Parker said.

"It's really hard to say which areas will come back first," she said, adding it will likely be a combination of limited subway and bus service. "It will come back gradually."

It could be four to five days before subway service resumes, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg told a news conference on Tuesday. As for buses, the city is hoping to resume limited service on Tuesday and full service on Wednesday, he said.

About 5.3 million people use the city's subway system on weekdays. The system, which runs around the clock, comprises 21 subway routes linked by 468 stations, and stretches across 660 miles of track.

The MTA's Metro North Railroad lost power on its suburban Hudson and New Haven lines, while there was flooding in an East River tunnel used by the Long Island Rail Road, the agency said.

New Jersey's PATH commuter train service, which connects New Jersey with New York City, will likely remain suspended for at least a week to 10 days, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said.

New York City closed down subway, bus and commuter train systems on Sunday night - a full day before Sandy, one of the biggest storms to ever hit the United States, made landfall on Monday night in neighboring New Jersey.

Sandy was especially imposing because of its wide-ranging winds. The storm brought a record storm surge of almost 14 feet to downtown Manhattan, well above the previous record of 10 feet during Hurricane Donna in 1960, the National Weather Service said.

(Reporting by Edith Honan; Additional reporting by Martinne Geller; Editing by Eric Beech and Paul Simao)

Officials Improvise Plan for Crane Dangling in Midtown

1:28 pm David W. Dunlap

Officials Improvise Plan for Crane Dangling in Midtown

A crane damaged during the storm dangled high above Midtown Manhattan.Chang W. Lee/The New York Times A crane damaged during the storm dangled high above Midtown Manhattan.

New York City officials scrambled on Tuesday to improvise a plan for securing and removing the crane boom that was upended hundreds of feet over West 57th Street in the early hours of the storm and has been dangling there ever since.

“The Department of Buildings has determined that the crane is currently stable,” Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said at his morning news briefing.

Once the high winds have died down, he said, the loosened boom will be shunted over and strapped to the building, a 73-story apartment tower known as One57, at 157 West 57th Street. (It is marketed as a 90-story building, but city records show only 73.)

A secondary crane would then be erected on the roof of One57 to help dismantle the damaged crane.

Once the boom is secured, the mayor said, the city could begin to reopen surrounding streets and allow occupants back into nearby buildings. He did not give a timetable.

Though the dangling boom is among the most compelling spectacles in the aftermath of the storm, the greatest immediate danger may come from a less obvious element: the counterweights under the crane platform that normally balance the boom atop the slender tower on which it rises. That tower depends for its lateral stability on being tied to the building at intervals.

Since the boom has flipped over, the heavy loads at the very top of the tower are no longer in balance.

“The weights are so heavy, they put tremendous strain on the building tie-ins,” said Robert Stewart of RCS Consulting in South Plainfield, N.J., which advises the building industry on construction- and demolition-related problems. He said the entire dismantling operation would probably take months.

More Than 8 Million U.S. Homes Without Power

11:41 am Andy Newman

More Than 8 Million U.S. Homes Without Power

About 8.5 million households from Maine to Michigan to North Carolina, representing about 7 percent of the country’s population, lacked power Tuesday afternoon, officials said.

Here are the state-by-state figures from The Associated Press:

1. New Jersey: 2.5 million.
2. New York: 2.3 million.
3. Pennsylvania: 1.2 million.
4. Connecticut: 615,000.
5. Maryland: 290,000.
6. Massachusetts: 290,000.
7. West Virginia: 271,000.
8. Ohio: 250,000.
9. New Hampshire: 210,000.
10. Virginia: 180,000.
11. Rhode Island: 110,000.
12. Maine: 86,000.
13. Michigan: 79,000.
14. Delaware: 45,000.
15. Washington, D.C.: 25,000.
16. Vermont: 10,000.
17. North Carolina: 6,600.

Total Death Toll at 38

10:58 am Andy Newman

Total Death Toll at 38

As searches revealed grim scenes up and down the Eastern Seaboard, the overall death toll from the storm had climbed to 38, officials said.

Here are the state-by-state totals, reported by The Associated Press on Tuesday afternoon, with two deaths not listed:

• New York: 17
• Pennsylvania: 5
• New Jersey: 4
• Connecticut: 3
• Maryland: 2
• Virginia: 2
• West Virginia: 1
• North Carolina: 1
• Off the coast of North Carolina: 1

Congressman's Home Burned Down in Storm

10:36 am Sam Dolnick

Congressman's Home Burned Down in Storm

Bob Turner at his home in Breezy Point, Queens, in September 2011.Uli Seit for The New York Times Bob Turner at his home in Breezy Point, Queens, in September 2011.

Representative Bob Turner’s home in Breezy Point, Queens, was one of dozens that burned down in the storm, a spokeswoman confirmed Tuesday.

Mr. Turner, a Republican, was home when the fire broke out early Tuesday morning, but both he and his wife are safe, said Jessica Proud, who was a spokeswoman for his campaign. “They made it out safely. They were there well into the storm,” she said.

Michael R. Long, chairman of the state Conservative Party, had a home nearby that also burned down, Ms. Proud said. It was not his primary residence and he, too, was safe, she said.

The fire in Breezy Point, fueled by the storm’s unrelenting winds, reduced more than 80 homes to smoldering ash. Flooded streets in the area prevented firefighters from reaching the blaze, compounding the devastation.

“If you and I were trying to walk in waist-deep water, it’s difficult — now picture doing that to fight a fire. It’s incredibly difficult,” said Frank Dwyer, a spokesman for the city’s Fire Department. “Very high winds were creating blow-torch effects on the blocks, spreading the fire around.” Share this post on: Twitter Facebook

Blizzard Conditions in Appalachians

10:36 am Kim Severson

Blizzard Conditions in Appalachians

Hikers clear off snow on Tuesday in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.J. Miles Cary/Knoxville News Sentinel, via Associated Press Hikers clear off snow on Tuesday in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee.

The freak winter storm that crashed into the tropical storm from the Atlantic brought as much of two feet of snow to Appalachian states, spreading blizzard or near-blizzard conditions over parts of Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland, Virginia and North Carolina, officials said.

The storm dumped what may well be a record amount of heavy, wet snow in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

“Our average snowfall for the month of October is two inches, and now here we are at over 22 inches and we still have another day to go,” Dana Soehn, a park spokeswoman, said on Wednesday morning.

More than a foot had fallen at Newfound Gap, Tenn., a small community at about 5,000 feet near the Tennessee-North Carolina border, according to the National Weather Service.

A few inches of snow had fallen in higher elevations in other parts of eastern Tennessee, as well, and in parts of the North Carolina mountains near Asheville, N.C.

Wet snow and high winds spinning off the edge of the storm also spread blizzard conditions over parts of West Virginia and Maryland, The Associated Press reported.

The National Weather Service said a foot and more of snow was reported in lower elevations of West Virginia, while higher elevations were getting more than two feet, according to The A.P.

Authorities closed more than 45 miles of Interstate 68 on either side of the West Virginia-Maryland state line because of blizzard conditions and stuck cars.

Meanwhile, gusty winds from the storm continued to be felt in eastern Alabama and parts of Georgia, some of them topping 35 miles per hour.

Schools to Stay Closed, Bloomberg Says; Subways Out '4 or 5 Days'

8:33 am Andy Newman

Schools to Stay Closed, Bloomberg Says; Subways Out '4 or 5 Days'

The New York City subway system, hit by unprecedented damage from the storm, will remain closed for “a good four or five days,” and schools will be closed again on Wednesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Tuesday morning.

The mayor said, however, that he hoped some bus service would be restored by Tuesday afternoon, and that he hoped to announce full restoration of bus service by Wednesday.

Other highlights from the mayor’s 11 a.m. briefing:

Death toll: Now stands at 10

Breezy Point fires: The blazes that destroyed more than 80 homes overnight in the Rockaways are finally under control. “It looked like a forest fire out in the Midwest,” the mayor said.

Other fires: At least 23 major fires elsewhere in the city.

Tap water: Safe to drink, but heavily chlorinated so it will taste different.

Group cabs: An executive order was signed, allowing yellow cabs to pick up multiple passengers at multiple points, and allowing livery cars to pick up street hails.

Power: At least 750,000 New York City residents are without power, including residents of 59 public-housing buildings.

Shelters: More than 6,100 people are now at 76 shelters.

Airports: Closed.

Causes of storm fatalities: “A whole variety of causes,” the mayor said. “Someone was in their house in their bed and a tree fell on him and killed him. Someone stepped in a puddle where there was an electric wire. We had a couple of bodies in someone’s house, I’m not sure what the story is there.”

Dangling crane: It is stable but can’t be fully secured till the winds die down. “The procedure will be to get the boom and strap it to the building, then we can reopen the streets,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Some Bridges Set to Reopen

6:49 am Matt Flegenheimer

Some Bridges Set to Reopen

The Queensboro Bridge on Tuesday morning.Ruth Fremson/The New York Times The Queensboro Bridge on Tuesday morning.

The city expected the Manhattan, Brooklyn, Williamsburg and Ed Koch Queensboro Bridges to reopen shortly on Tuesday morning, an official said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said the Tappan Zee Bridge had been reopened.

The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and Queens-Midtown Tunnel remain closed, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the tunnels. The Lincoln Tunnel has been open throughout the storm.

On Monday, the governor closed many of the area’s major bridges, including the George Washington, Verrazano-Narrows, Whitestone and Throgs Neck Bridges.

Power Could Be Out in Manhattan for Days, Con Ed Says

7:20 am Patrick McGeehan

Power Could Be Out in Manhattan for Days, Con Ed Says

Much of Manhattan below Midtown could be without electricity for several days after an explosion at a substation on the East River on Monday night, a spokesman for Consolidated Edison said Tuesday morning.

More than 240,000 customers – and many more people – were without power more than 12 hours after the explosion that looked spectacular but did not injure any of about a dozen utility workers who were at the site at the east end of 14th Street. Each customer could represent a household or even an entire apartment building.

The blast knocked out electricity for all of Manhattan below 39th Street on the east side and 31st Street on the west side – with the exception of a few pockets, including Battery Park City.

In the two hours before the explosion, Con Edison officials purposefully turned off all power to two small sections of the financial district in Lower Manhattan and in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. Power to those areas could be restored in three or four days after utility crews pump out floodwater and dry and repair equipment below ground, said Bob McGee, a spokesman for Con Edison. But he said it may take longer to restore power to customers whose service was interrupted by the explosion.

John Miksad, the company’s senior vice president for electric operations, said, “This is the largest storm-related outage in our history.”

Con Edison officials believed the explosion was caused by water flooding the substation but had not ruled out flying debris, the spokesman said.

Transit Restoration Likely to Be Piecemeal

6:54 am Matt Flegenheimer

Transit Restoration Likely to Be Piecemeal

Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, suggested that New Yorkers should expect their mass transit to return “in pieces and parts” in the days to come.

“We’re going to try to be creative,” Mr. Lhota said in an interview with WNYC. “Those portions of the system that can be up and running, I want them up and running as quickly as possible.”

He added, “If there’s a portion of the system that’s going to take longer to repair, that doesn’t mean the whole system is down.”

He suggested, for instance, that buses could be rerouted to complement the mass transit services that are available.

Mr. Lhota declined to give a timetable for restoring service, saying that to do so would be “a scientific wild guess on my part.” He said the authority could provide a more substantial update later in the day Tuesday, as the sunlight allowed crews to assess the system more thoroughly.

But it was already clear that significant damage had been done. “Our electrical systems, our alarm systems, tell us when there’s water down there,” Mr. Lhota told WNYC. “They basically shut off. It’s an automatic system that saves the electricity and doesn’t cause problems. And they all shut off in relatively quick fashion. They would only shut off if there was water down there.”

While seven subway tunnels were flooded beneath the East River, Mr. Lhota has emphasized that the damage was not confined to the Lower Manhattan area. On the Metro-North Railroad’s Hudson line, power was lost from 59th Street to Croton-Harmon. On the New Haven line, it was lost through New Haven. The Long Island Rail Road evacuated its West Side Yards, and one East River tunnel flooded.

The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel flooded end to end, and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel took on water as well.

Mr. Lhota told WNYC he had just sent a text message to Patrick J. Foye, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, in hopes of determining how and when the agencies could open bridges and tunnels.

“The tunnels, if they’re dry, the assessment can be relatively straightforward,” Mr. Lhota said. “The bridges, given the extent of the wind, we’re going to need a couple hours having the engineers assess that there’s no damage to any of the bridges.”

Hundreds of thousands without power across Mass.

Hundreds of thousands without power across Mass.

By Brian Ballou, John R. Ellement, Melissa Werthmann and Sarah N. Mattero | Globe Staff and Globe Corespondent

October 30, 2012

Utility crews were racing to restore power to some 225,000 Massachusetts customers today as state and local officials - and homeowners - began efforts to assess the damage caused by Hurricane Sandy, the massive storm that hammered the East Coast on Monday.

Patrick: Bay State ‘very fortunate’ to escape Sandy’s worst wrath

Patrick: Bay State ‘very fortunate’ to escape Sandy’s worst wrath

By Laurel J. Sweet

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Gov. Deval Patrick breathed a huge sigh of relief on behalf of his hurricane-battered state this morning, declaring, “we feel very fortunate” in comparison to New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, where Sandy concentrated her greatest suffering.

“There’s a roof here, there’s siding there, but no place where there was devastation. I’m relieved, that’s for sure,” Patrick told reporters at the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency’s Framingham bunker.

Patrick said he expects to announce a preliminary damage estimate later today. MEMA incident reponse teams have been deployed to assess the storm’s impact. He and Lt. Gov. Tim Murray were headed from Framingham to Revere to check in on Department of Conservation employees at Revere Beach.

Patrick said “there are a lot of downed trees” across the commonwealth, “but no reports of serious injury or serious infrastructure damage.” Only 161 people remained in shelters this morning that had capacity for 20,000 storm refugees.

“I think, on the whole, we’re in the process of cleaning up now. It turned out OK,” Patrick said.

Boston, meanwhile, is back in business and public transportation up and running, but more than 270,000 residents across the state remain in the dark as morning’s first light has brought clarity to the ugly aftermath of former Hurricane Sandy.

As of 10:30 a.m., National Grid was reporting 202,167 customers without power, and NSTAR, 72,188.

“Now is the time for the utility companies to show us their performance,” Patrick said. “We’ll just to see how it goes.”

National Weather Service meteorologist Charlie Foley said scattered showers and a rogue gust or two can be expected throughout today. “But it’s going to be spotty,” he said. “For the most part, it’s over.”

The NWS is forecasting today’s high temperature to peak close to 70 degrees. Temperatures are expected to remain in the low 60s under mostly cloudy skies for trick-or-treaters tomorrow night.

Though commuter boat service remains suspended, most MBTA schedules returned to normal. Shuttle buses have temporarily replaced trains on the Green Line D Branch between Riverside and Newton Highlands due to downed trees and power lines.

Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor service will remain suspended today. Logan International Airport is open but MassPort continues to advise travelers to check with their airlines before arriving, due to the fact that hundreds of flights were cancelled during the storm.

Boston schools are back open and all state workers are expected to be at work by 10 a.m.

Sandy’s wrath apparently kept many on their best behavior. Boston police made no arrests during the storm last night, department spokeswoman Officer Neva Coakley said.

Around the state, Bay Staters began surveying damage and cleaning up. In Newton, Chris and Laura Lanfear got their first good look at the mangled mess that was their 2008 Audi A4 until a fallen tree crushed it late yesterday afternoon.

The vehicle was Laura Lanfear’s gift to herself two years ago for surviving colon cancer, her husband said, and the couple’s sense of perspective may explain why they’re able to laugh about their loss today.

“It’s kind of a bummer,” Chris Lanfear said, “but hey, it’s just the way it is, right? I guess it was our turn.”

The couple, who are parents of two children, said the tree was one of a handful that uprooted on Farmington Road about 4 p.m. yesterday during a particularly strong wind gust.

Recovery Begins In Aftermath Of Hurricane Sandy; About 600,000 Without Power

Recovery Begins In Aftermath Of Hurricane Sandy; About 600,000 Without Power

Storm Kills Three; One Still Missing

Flooding prevents Old Saybrook firefighters from reaching burning homes early Tuesday.

By DAVID OWENS and JULIE STAGIS, dowens@courant.com The Hartford Courant

2:25 p.m. EDT, October 30, 2012

Connecticut moved into recovery mode Tuesday in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

The storm left flooded roads and damaged homes from Groton to Greenwich, toppled trees across the state and left more than 638,000 utility customers in the dark at the peak of the outages.

One person is missing and three people died in storm-related incidents, including a volunteer firefighter in Easton.

During a tour of the state to assess damage and meet with local officers, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy met with Easton firefighters. He shook hands with them and spoke privately with them about their loss. Their colleague, a 13-year veteran, was killed about 7:45 p.m. Monday when he was struck by a falling tree limb. He'd been working to remove debris from a roadway when he was struck.

In Newtown, where 97 percent of the town is without power, Malloy spoke with town officials. He was joined by Fifth District U.S. Rep. Chris Murphy and Correction Commissioner Leo C. Arnone. There is a prison in Newtown.

The hurricane's winds brought down dozens of trees in Newtown, Easton and rural parts of Fairfield County.

In Newtown a woman approached governor's car and said "we need help." They chatted briefly.

At noon on Tuesday Gov. Malloy toured burned out homes in Old Greenwich along with the town officials and Fourth District U.S. Rep. Jim Himes. He visited the still-smoldering remains of one of the homes destroyed by fire not far from Long Island Sound. Nearby lawns were covered with debris and garbage left by the record high tide. Police kept onlookers at a distance and the air still smelled of smoke. Everywhere there were downed trees and limbs.

Tuesday afternoon Malloy toured the Shippan neighborhood in Stamford, where he was joined by U.S. Sen. Joe Lieberman and U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal and Himes.

Malloy, who used to live in the neighborhood, greeted linemen from Kansas City and other workers as they cleared damage and debris from the storm surge that swamped the neighborhood Monday night.

"We appreciate what you are doing,'' Malloy said.

There were dense piles of brush in front of every home, trees and branches were down, and electric wires were still on the ground.

While traveling from Greenwich to Stamford, Malloy talked on the phone with President Obama.

Malloy said the president told him the state's application for disaster relief, which was about to be filed, would be approved within 24 hours.

Later, while travelling from Stamford to Bridgeport, Malloy spoke with officials from FEMA, who told him an emergency disaster declaration for the state's four coastal counties – Fairfield, New Haven, Middlesex and New London – will be approved within hours. That will expedite funds to help pay for storm cleanup, he said.

The governor also took calls from the governors of Massachusetts, Florida, Vermont and North Carolina, who all offered assistance.

"There's a lot of coordinated assistance going on here,'' Malloy said, adding that he was pleased with the response by the federal government and Connecticut Light & Power.

"All signs are pretty darn good,'' he said of the CL&P response. "They've learned a lot of lessons."

At his morning briefing earlier in the day, Malloy talked about the storm's impact on the state.

"We took a big hit over the past few days, and I want to thank the people of Connecticut for hanging in there," Malloy said. "We did our best to protect you and stand with you, and now it's our job to get people's lives back to normal as quickly as possible. That may take some time, but we won't rest until it happens."

Malloy lifted the ban on non-essential travel on state highways at 8 a.m. Tuesday morning. And CT Transit bus service was scheduled to resume service about noon Tuesday in the Hartford, New Britain, Wallingford, Meriden and Waterbury Divisions. There will be no Hartford area express service Tuesday.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York is working to restore service, but is dealing with flooding and extensive damage to its facilities, including the New Haven line of Metro-North. Amtrak said it is assessing damage and making repairs.

"Right now my attention is 100 percent focused on getting people's lives back to normal as quickly as possible," Malloy said.

There are likely thousands of housing units that have been impacted by the storm, Malloy said.

Malloy canceled his noon briefing so that he could tour the state and check damage.

Connecticut Light & Power Co. Senior Vice President Bill Quinlan said the company is assessing the damage and working to get power restored.

"It will be a multiple-day outage for some customers," Quinlan said, adding he was not in a position to predict when all customers would have power restored.

Tony Marone of United Illuminating said flood waters did not infiltrate substations near the Sound, thanks to the work of local fire crews, UI crews and the National Guard. Efforts are underway to get the substations back online and to get customers restored. So far 28,000 customers have their power back, Marone said.

"We are doing our best this morning to get on the ground assessments in those impacted shoreline towns, and when we have specific numbers — in terms of property damage, evacuations that occurred, missing people, and the recovery efforts that have succeeded — we will update you," he said.

Two homes in Old Saybrook that caught fire around 9 p.m. Monday finally burned out about 5:30 Tuesday morning. Firefighters were unable to reach the homes due to flooding at Chalker Beach.

Malloy on Monday had urged officials in towns from Bridgeport to Greenwich to order mandatory evacuations of low-lying areas. There had been reports of people stranded in their homes by flood waters Monday night and early Tuesday, but by 6:30 a.m. Tuesday Malloy said it was his understanding all had been reached by rescuers.

State police identified a person killed in Mansfield as Olga Raymond, 90. Raymond was killed when a tree fell on three residents of a home who had ventured outside after they lost power. An electric line became entangled in the tree and Raymond was killed, police said. The other two were treated at a hospital. Milford authorities said the body of Brian Bakunas, 34, of Milford was recovered from Long Island Sound on Tuesday. He had gone swimming Monday as the storm approached.

A kayaker identified as Jeff Kumweide, 23, of Milford, is still missing.

As the storm moved north Tuesday, Connecticut shifted to the problems of cleanup. State and utility officials warned that restoration of power could take days, as rainy, windy weather forecast for the rest of the week may make it unsafe for crews to work in some areas.

Those staying in homes without power will see seasonal temperatures over the next several days, with highs in the mid-50s to low 60s, and overnight lows in the 40s.

Shoreline Hit Hardest

The shoreline bore the brunt of the storm, with damaging water and wind. As the storm approached, officials were particularly concerned with the impact of storm surges — a rise in coastal water fueled by high winds — with some models projecting unprecedented tides on Long Island Sound.

Tuesday morning at Stannard Beach in Westbrook, landscaper Jim Moore was assessing the damage to some of his clients' homes. Moore said it appeared that the oceanfront homes took on some water, but not as much as they did in Irene.

"When they rebuilt, they beefed things up a little bit," Moore said, adding that the sea walls fared much better than in Irene as well.

"Last time there were big chunks of walls missing," he said.

In East Haven's Cosey Beach area, Mayor Joseph Maturo and police and fire officials were assessing the damage Tuesday morning, and the area remained blocked off. Initial reports said that damage there was not as significant as that done by Irene. There was significant flooding, but less wind and structural damage to houses, many of which homes are on temporary footing and still under repair from Irene.

East Haven and Branford public works crews had most of the main streets cleared, removing trees from roadways. Short Beach Road through Branford into East Haven had been reopened, and Coe Avenue had been cleared and reopened as of 8 a.m. Tuesday. But large swaths of East Haven and Branford remained without power. The National Guard was assisting local officials with traffic control and keeping people off the beach.

Homeowners lined up Tuesday morning at a checkpoint at Coe and Soundview avenues, anxious to assess the damage themselves, but were told by officials that they couldn't get to their homes. Maturo said the damage assessment would go faster if officials didn't have to deal with homeowners just yet.

Neil Gottfried and three family members spent the night at the Daisy Ingraham Elementary School in Westbrook Monday night.

"It was fabulous," Gottfried said, as he packed his car to return to his home nearby and begin cleaning up. "These people were the nicest and most courteous."

School Principal Kit Bishop said 97 people and about a dozen cats and dogs spent the night. Many left Tuesday morning beginning around 5 a.m.

Bishop said she wasn't sure if the shelter would remain open Tuesday night and that they expected to know by noon. School has already been canceled for Wednesday, Bishop said.

The storm created havoc along the shoreline Monday night. In New Haven, more than 40 trees fell in an hour's time. In Fairfield, Police Chief Gary McNamara urged residents not to leave their homes with so many trees and power lines down, taking to Twitter to announce: "We have limited response abilities … Please stay inside your house we are experiencing massive damage."

A home in Greenwich caught fire, and winds scattered burning debris, setting four more houses on fire. In Old Saybrook, police confirmed that two houses were in flames Monday at Chalker Beach, but the fire department was unable to reach the blaze due to flooding.

In New London, Mayor Daryl Justin Finizio originally ordered police and other emergency personnel to return to their posts, saying the wind in the city — topping 53 mph with gusts topping 75 mph at the Ledge Lighthouse — made it too dangerous to be in the field. But hours later, fearing a generator at the city's shelter couldn't handle an extended outage, police were called to escort buses relocating residents to a shelter in East Lyme.

In Old Saybrook, part of the Indian Town section was under several feet of water. And across the shore, officials worried about the integrity of sewage treatment plants. Officials in Norwalk prepared to shut down the city's plant and instruct residents not to flush their toilets.

Early Tuesday morning, firefighters from around Hartford County were headed to Westport to help with a backlog of about 100 routine calls, according to Westport Fire Chief Andrew Kingsbury.

Inland, trees were down into wires, closing some roads. In Avon early Tuesday, Route 10 was closed from Talcott Notch Road to Route 44, and Route 44 was closed at the base of Avon Mountain toward West Hartford.

CL&P was out working on the wires, a dispatcher said. It was unclear when the roads would reopen.

In Danbury, a dispatcher said there were "trees into wires everywhere." Many roads there, including Route 37, were closed.

Electric Infrastructure Needs Improvements?

Sandy was polite in comparison to the kind of destructive storms likely to blast through here in the future, the state's energy chief says — adding that Connecticut must modernize and strengthen its electrical transmission "infrastructure" to avoid the paralyzing effects of Monday's hurricane, particularly along the coastline.

This week's big storm, for all the devastation it brought, was only a "Category 1" hurricane – the low designation, for storms with winds of 74 to 95 miles per hour – and Commissioner Daniel Esty of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection says: "I think we're going to see a need, going forward, to plan for potentially even bigger storms."

"We are planning for potential Category 3 hurricanes, going forward," Esty said at the State Armory Monday evening as Sandy's winds blew hard outside. He was there for a briefing from Malloy on storm developments. A Category 3 storm has wind speeds from 111 to 129 miles per hour, "and I think that … is an order of potential damage much greater than we already see here."

As utilities' facilities are replaced and rebuilt, particularly along the coastline, they need to be stronger and higher in elevation, Esty said. Electrical control equipment, vulnerable to rising water, should at least be located on a higher level of such structures — and that includes sewage treatment plants along the water, he said.

"I think you have to look at where the infrastructure is and what would have been presumed appropriate in the 1930s, '40s, '50s, when some of this was built, is probably now 70 or 80 years on [and is] not likely to be seen as good locations. And when there is rebuilding of infrastructure, I think we're going to have to move things into a more hardened mode. And that may require moving some things back from the shoreline. It may require moving some things up [in elevation]."

Esty was asked if his agency's planning, both long- and short-term, is based on an expectation that storms will grow more intense year after year. "I think one has to be very careful in saying that you've got evidence of climate change in front of you. But I think prudence argues that what the climate scientists believe is potentially happening is an increased intensity and frequency of windstorms, including hurricanes in Connecticut, and that a thoughtful state government would take that into account and plan for it."

What kind of plans would prepare the state for improvements to withstand stronger storms?

Esty said: "I think there are some things that need to be done in a much faster time frame. Some of that, the governor has already called for to begin immediately – I mean the investment in a structure of distributed generation: more small-scale power and micro-grids that can be 'islanded' when the grid goes down." That, Esty added, is "exactly the kind of thing you'd want to do in the face of greater risk from hurricanes."

Closures Continue

Many businesses and offices that were closed Monday did not reopen Tuesday. State courts will remain closed, as will many schools across the state, and Malloy said "non-essential" state employees should not report to work Tuesday.

Around midday Monday, Malloy ordered trucks off the highways and urged motorists to stay home. Most public transportation was also shut down, including Amtrak and Metro-North trains, CT Transit buses and flights in and out of Bradley International Airport. At 7 a.m. Tuesday, the departures schedule for Bradley showed most flights cancelled through noon.

The state has extended the expiration dates for vehicle registrations, licenses and other permits and certificates issued by the state Department of Motor Vehicles because of the storm. The new expiration date has not been determined.

President Obama late Sunday approved Malloy's request to declare a pre-landfall emergency in Connecticut, which will allow the state to request federal funds and other assistance.

Insurance modeling company EQECAT said Hurricane Sandy is expected to cost a total of $10 billion to $20 billion in economic damages, and $5 billion to $10 billion in losses covered by insurers. For reference, Tropical Storm Irene caused $10 billion in economic damages across the entire area it hit.

"I know the state has never been this well-prepared," Malloy said Monday. "The question is, is it enough? I'll tell you in 24 to 72 hours."

Courant staff writers Steven Goode, Dave Altimari, Denise Buffa, Matthew Conyers, Christine Dempsey, Brian Dowling, Amanda Falcone, Kenneth Gosselin, Alaine Griffin, Samaia Hernandez, Christopher Keating, Jesse Leavenworth, Jon Lender, Peter Marteka, Kathy Megan, Hilda Muñoz, David Owens, Korky Vann and Bill Weir contributed to this report.

Storm’s cost may hit $50B; rebuilding to ease blow

Storm’s cost may hit $50B; rebuilding to ease blow

Tue Oct 30, 2012 1:20 PM

WASHINGTON — Superstorm Sandy will end up causing about $20 billion in property damages and $10 billion to $30 billion more in lost business, according to IHS Global Insight, a forecasting firm.

In the long run, the devastation the storm inflicted on New York City and other parts of the Northeast will barely nick the U.S. economy. That’s the view of economists who say a slightly slower economy in coming weeks will likely be matched by reconstruction and repairs that will contribute to growth over time.

The short-term blow to the economy, though, could subtract about 0.6 percentage point from U.S. economic growth in the October-December quarter, IHS says. Retailers, airlines and home construction firms will likely lose some business.

The storm cut power to about 7 million homes, shut down 70 percent of East Coast oil refineries and inflicted worse-than-expected damage in the New York metro area. That area produces about 10 percent of U.S. economic output.

New York City was all but closed off by car, train and air. The superstorm overflowed the city’s waterfront, flooded the financial district and subway tunnels and cut power to hundreds of thousands. Power is expected to be fully restored in Manhattan and Brooklyn within four days.

Most homeowners who suffered losses from flooding won’t be able to benefit from their insurance policies. Standard homeowner policies don’t cover flood damage, and few homeowners have flood insurance.

Across U.S. industries, disruptions will slow the economy temporarily. Some restaurants and stores will draw fewer customers. Factories may shut down or hold shorter shifts because of a short-term drop in customer demand.

Some of those losses won’t be easily made up. Restaurants that lose two or three days of business, for example, won’t necessarily experience a rebound later. And money spent to repair a home may lead to less spending elsewhere.

With some roads in the Northeast impassable after the storm, drivers won’t be filling up as much. That will slow demand for gasoline. Pump prices, which had been declining before the storm, will likely keep slipping. The national average for a gallon of regular fell by about a penny Tuesday, to $3.53 — more than 11 cents lower than a week ago.

Shipping and business travel has been suspended in areas of the Northeast. More than 15,000 flights across the Northeast and the world have been grounded, and it will take days for some passengers to get where they’re going.

On Tuesday, more than 6,000 flights were canceled, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware. More than 500 flights scheduled for Wednesday were also canceled.

The three big New York airports were closed Tuesday by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. New York has the nation’s busiest airspace, so cancellations there drastically affect travel in other cities.

Economists noted that the hit to the economy in the short run was worsened by the size of the population centers the storm hit.

“Sandy hit a high-population-density area with a lot of expensive homes,” said Beata Caranci, deputy chief economist at TD Bank.

Hurricane damage to homes, businesses and roads reduces U.S. wealth. But it doesn’t subtract from the government’s calculation of economic activity.

By contrast, rebuilding and restocking by businesses and consumers add to the nation’s gross domestic product — the broadest gauge of economic production. GDP measures all goods and services produced in the United States.

Paul Ashworth, chief U.S. economist at Capital Economics, expects the storm to shave 0.1 to 0.2 percentage point from annual economic growth in the October-December quarter. He thinks the economy will grow at an annual rate of 1.5 percent to 2 percent in the fourth quarter. It expanded at a 2 percent annual rate last quarter.

But Ashworth says any losses this quarter should be made up later as rebuilding boosts sales at building supply stores and other companies.

“People will load up on whatever they need to make repairs — roofing, dry wall, carpeting — to deal with the damage,” he says.

In the short run, Caranci said the economic damage could be heaviest for small businesses that lack the money and other resources to withstand lost sales.

“It will remain to be seen how long disruptions to electricity and infrastructure persist,” she said.

But she noted that the storm should give a boost to the construction industry, which shed millions of workers after the housing bust. Many who lost construction jobs were skilled employees with disproportionately high pay, and the loss of those jobs hit the economy hard.

Major retailers began trying Tuesday to ramp up their operations before the critical holiday shopping period.

Sears Holdings Corp., which operates Kmart and Sears, said 80 of its stores were still closed as of midday Tuesday, down from 187 Monday. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s biggest retailer, said it was working to reopen the 168 stores it closed. And Darden Restaurants Inc., parent company of Olive Garden and Red Lobster, by Tuesday afternoon had reopened roughly 160 of the 260 restaurants it closed Monday.

Retailers collect up to 40 percent of their annual revenue in November and December. Retailers, excluding restaurants, could lose at least $25 billion in sales this week, estimates Burt Flickinger III of retail consultancy Strategic Resource Group. Because of the storm, he’s reduced his forecast for holiday sales to a 2.1 percent increase over last year from the 3.2 percent increase he had predicted earlier.

Reopening is often difficult after a storm. New York City’s subways and buses remained closed Tuesday, making it hard for employees to get to work. Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue flagship stores stayed closed Tuesday — bad news for those retailers, because major department stores can derive 10 percent of annual sales from their Manhattan locations.

Still, those stores that could open for business did. A Westside Market in Manhattan remained open 24 hours a day throughout the storm, even though only about 20 percent of workers managed to show up Monday and Tuesday.

“They found a way to get here — I don’t know how,” store manager Jay Bilone said.

Economists expect that actual damages from Hurricane Sandy will exceed those caused last year by Hurricane Irene, which cost $15.8 billion. Irene had little effect on the nation’s growth.

Sandy will likely be among the 10 costliest hurricanes in U.S. history. It would still be far below the worst — Hurricane Katrina, which cost $108 billion and caused 1,200 deaths in 2005.

But “there is every reason to believe that the hurricane won’t kick the legs out of an already-fragile US economy,” Caranci said.

———

AP Business Writers Sandy Shore in Denver, Candice Choi and Anne D’Innocenzio in New York and Mark Jewell in Boston contributed to this report.

Sandy hard-hit areas struggle to get back to life

Sandy hard-hit areas struggle to get back to life

By Adam Geller Associated Press Wed Oct 31, 2012 7:19 AM

NEW YORK — Two major airports reopened and the floor of the New York Stock Exchange came back to life Wednesday, but across the river in New Jersey, the National Guard searched for flood victims and fires still raged two days after Superstorm Sandy.

For the first time since the storm battered the Northeast, killing 55 people and doing billions of dollars in damage, brilliant sunshine washed over the nation’s largest city — a striking sight after days of gray skies, rain and wind.

It was clear that restoring the region to its ordinarily frenetic pace could take days — and that rebuilding the hardest-hit communities and the transportation networks that link them together could take considerably longer.

“We will get through the days ahead by doing what we always do in tough times — by standing together, shoulder to shoulder, ready to help a neighbor, comfort a stranger and get the city we love back on its feet,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.

The scale of the challenge could be seen across the Hudson River in New Jersey, where National Guard troops arrived in the heavily flooded city of Hoboken to help evacuate thousands still stuck in their homes. And new problems arose when firefighters were unable to reach blazes rekindled by natural gas leaks in the heavily hit shore town of Mantoloking.

As New York began its second day after the megastorm, morning rush-hour traffic was heavy as people started returning to work. There was even a sign of normalcy: commuters waiting at bus stops.

On the Brooklyn Bridge, closed earlier because of high winds, joggers and bikers made their way across the span before sunrise. One cyclist carried a flashlight. Car traffic on the bridge was busy, and slowed as it neared Manhattan.

By late Tuesday, the winds and flooding inflicted by the fast-weakening Sandy had subsided, leaving at least 55 people dead along the Atlantic Coast and splintering beachfront homes and boardwalks from the mid-Atlantic states to southern New England.

The storm later moved across Pennsylvania on a predicted path toward New York State and Canada.

At the height of the disaster, more than 8.2 million lost electricity — some as far away as Michigan. Nearly a quarter of those without power were in New York, where lower Manhattan’s usually bright lights remained dark for a second night.

But, amid the despair, talk of recovery was already beginning.

“It’s heartbreaking after being here 37 years,” Barry Prezioso of Point Pleasant, N.J., said as he returned to his house in the beachfront community to survey the damage. “You see your home demolished like this, it’s tough. But nobody got hurt and the upstairs is still livable, so we can still live upstairs and clean this out. I’m sure there’s people that had worse. I feel kind of lucky.”

Much of the initial recovery efforts focused on New York City, the region’s economic heart. Bloomberg said it could take four or five days before the subway, which suffered the worst damage in its 108-year history, is running again. All 10 of the tunnels that carry commuters under the East River were flooded. But high water prevented inspectors from immediately assessing damage to key equipment, raising the possibility that the nation’s largest city could endure an extended shutdown of the system that 5 million people count on to get to work and school each day. The chairman of the state agency that runs the subway, Joseph Lhota, said service might have to resume piecemeal, and experts said the cost of the repairs could be staggering.

Power company Consolidated Edison said it would be four days before the last of the 337,000 customers in Manhattan and Brooklyn who lost power have electricity again and it could take a week to restore outages in the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island and Westchester County. Floodwater led to explosions that disabled a power substation Monday night, contributing to the outages.

Surveying the widespread damage, it was clear much of the recovery and rebuilding will take far longer.

When New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie stopped in Belmar, N.J., during a tour of the devastation, one woman wept openly and 42-year-old Walter Patrickis told him, “Governor, I lost everything.”

Christie, who called the shore damage “unthinkable,” said a full recovery would take months, at least, and it would likely be a week or more before power is restored to everyone who lost it.

“Now we’ve got a big task ahead of us that we have to do together. This is the kind of thing New Jerseyans are built for,” he said. President Barack Obama is scheduled to visit the state Wednesday to inspect the storm damage.

By sundown Tuesday, however, announcements from officials and scenes on the streets signaled that New York and nearby towns were edging toward a semblance of routine.

First came the reopening of highways in Connecticut and bridges across the Hudson and East rivers, although the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan, and the Holland Tunnel, between New York and New Jersey, remained closed.

A limited number of the white and blue buses that crisscross New York’s grid returned Tuesday evening to Broadway and other thoroughfares on a reduced schedule — but free of charge. Gov. Andrew Cuomo said he hoped there would be full service by Wednesday. Still, school was canceled for a third straight day Wednesday in the city, where many students rely on buses and subways to reach classrooms.

In one bit of good news, John F. Kennedy and Newark Liberty International airports reopened with limited service just after 7 a.m. Wednesday. New York’s LaGuardia Airport remains closed.

The New York Stock Exchange was again silent Tuesday — the first weather-related, two-day closure since the 19th century — but trading was scheduled to resume Wednesday morning with Bloomberg ringing the opening bell.

Amtrak also laid out plans to resume some runs in the Northeast on Wednesday, with modified service between Newark, N.J., and points south. That includes restoring Virginia service to Lynchburg, Richmond and Newport News, Keystone trains in Pennsylvania, and Downeaster service between Boston and Portland, Maine.

But flooding continues to prevent service to and from New York’s Penn Station. Amtrak said the amount of water in train tunnels under the Hudson and East rivers is unprecedented. There will be no Northeast Regional service between New York and Boston and no Acela Express service for the entire length of the Northeast Corridor. No date has been set for when it might resume.

But even with the return of some transportation and plans to reopen schools and businesses, the damage and pain inflicted by Sandy continued to unfold, confirming the challenge posed by rebuilding.

In New Jersey, amusement rides that once crowned a pier in Seaside Heights were dumped into the ocean, some homes were smashed, and others were partially buried in sand.

National Guard troops arrived in Hoboken on Tuesday night to find live wires dangling in the floodwaters that Mayor Dawn Zimmer said were rapidly mixing with sewage.

About 2.1 million homes and businesses remained without power across the state late Tuesday. When Tropical Storm Irene struck last year, it took more than a week to restore power everywhere. The state’s largest utility, PSE&G, said it was trying to dry out substations it had to shut down.

Outages in the state’s two largest cities, Newark and Jersey City, left traffic signals dark, resulting in numerous fender-benders at intersections where police were not directing traffic. And in one Jersey City supermarket, there were long lines to get bread and a spot at an outlet to charge cellphones.

Trees and power lines were down in every corner of the state. Schools and state government offices were closed for a second day, and many called off classes for Wednesday, too. The governor said the PATH trains connecting northern New Jersey with Manhattan would be out of service for at least seven to 10 days because of flooding. All the New Jersey Transit rail lines were damaged, he said, and it was not clear when the rail lines would be able to open.

In Connecticut, some residents of Fairfield returned home in kayaks and canoes to inspect widespread damage left by retreating floodwaters that kept other homeowners at bay.

“The uncertainty is the worst,” said Jessica Levitt, who was told it could be a week before she can enter her house. “Even if we had damage, you just want to be able to do something. We can’t even get started.”

The storm caused irreparable damage to homes in East Haven, Milford and other shore towns. Still, many were grateful the storm did not deliver a bigger blow, considering the havoc wrought in New York City and New Jersey.

“I feel like we are blessed,” said Bertha Weismann, whose garage was flooded in Bridgeport. “It could have been worse.”

And in New York, residents of the flooded beachfront neighborhood of Breezy Point in returned home to find fire had taken everything the water had not. A huge blaze destroyed perhaps 100 homes in the close-knit community where many had stayed behind despite being told to evacuate.

John Frawley, 57, acknowledged the mistake. Frawley, who lived about five houses from the fire’s edge, said he spent the night terrified “not knowing if the fire was going to jump the boulevard and come up to my house.”

“I stayed up all night,” he said. “The screams. The fire. It was horrifying.”

There were still only hints of the economic impact of the storm.

Forecasting firm IHS Global Insight predicted it will end up causing about $20 billion in damage and $10 billion to $30 billion in lost business. Another firm, AIR Worldwide, estimated losses up to $15 billion — big numbers probably offset by reconstruction and repairs that will contribute to longer-term growth.

“The biggest problem is not the first few days but the coming months,” said Alan Rubin, an expert in natural disaster recovery.

Some of those who lost homes and businesses to Sandy were promising to return and rebuild, but many sounded chastened by their encounter with nature’s fury. They included Tom Shalvey of Warwick, R.I., whose 500-square-foot cottage on the beach in South Kingstown was washed away by raging surf, leaving a utility pipe as the only marker of where it once sat.

“We love the beach. We had many great times here,” Shalvey said. “We will be back. But it will not be on the front row.”

Northeast back to business after Sandy's hard hit

Northeast back to business after Sandy's hard hit

By Martinne Geller, Emily Flitter and Dhanya Skariachan Reuters

10:53 a.m. CDT, October 31, 2012

NEW YORK—

The U.S. Northeast began crawling back to normal on Wednesday after monster storm Sandy crippled transportation, knocked out power for millions and killed at least 50 people in nine states with a massive storm surge and rain that caused epic flooding.

Financial markets reopened after taking two days off with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange, and packed buses took commuters to work with the subway system halted after seawater flooded its tunnels.

John F. Kennedy and Newark airports reopened with limited service after thousands of flights were canceled, leaving travelers stuck for days. New York's LaGuardia Airport, the third of the airports that serve the nation's busiest airspace, was flooded and remained closed.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the storm may be the most expensive in U.S. history.

It will take days or weeks to recover from the massive power and mass transit outages. Nearly 6 million customers are without electricity in the region.

The storm is causing more havoc as it moves north toward Canada. Flooding warnings are in effect in the Great Lakes region and heavy snow has been falling in the Appalachian mountains.

With six days to go before the Nov. 6 elections, President Barack Obama will visit storm-ravaged areas of the New Jersey shore, where the Sandy crashed ashore on Monday as the largest storm to hit the United States in generations.

Obama will be accompanied by Republican Governor Chris Christie, a vocal backer of presidential challenger Mitt Romney. Nevertheless, Christie has praised Obama and the federal response to the storm.

The storm killed 27 people in New York state, including 22 in New York City, and six each in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Six other states reported fatalities. One disaster-modeling company said Sandy may have caused up to $15 billion in insured losses.

Sandy killed 69 people in the Caribbean last week as a hurricane before it slammed into the U.S. East Coast with winds of about 80 miles per hour (130 km per hour) and pushed inland.

Remnants of the storm churned slowly over Pennsylvania on Wednesday, the National Weather Service said. Winter storm warnings were in effect from southwestern Pennsylvania to eastern Tennessee.

“Now we are looking at flooding on Lake Erie, possibly Lake Michigan,” Napolitano said. “We're looking at secondary flooding downstream as rivers fill with the remnants of Sandy and the water has to go somewhere.

”We are now in recovery mode - response and recovery - we are moving large amounts of resources into the affected areas. It will be one of the most, probably if not the most extensive and expensive … (storms) in our nation's history,“ she said.

Battered by a record storm surge of nearly 14 feet (4.2 meters), large sections of New York City remained submerged under several feet of water. In the city's borough of Staten Island, police used helicopters to pluck stranded residents from rooftops.

Across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, members of the National Guard helped residents pump floodwater from their homes, the city said on Twitter.

Chest-high floodwaters rushed into the streets in a flash on Monday night just after the power went out, and by Wednesday morning the water was still knee high in many areas of Hoboken.

National Guard vehicles patrolled the streets but emergency vehicles were scarce, witnesses said.

Some 5.9 million homes and businesses in several states remained without power on Wednesday morning, down from a high of nearly 8.5 million, which surpassed the record 8.4 million customers who went dark from last year's Hurricane Irene.

In New Jersey, Christie said it could take seven to 10 days before power was restored statewide.

In the southern half of Manhattan, a quarter of a million residents remained without power after a transformer explosion at a Consolidated Edison substation Monday night and the flooding of another. Citywide, some 760,000 customers lacked power on Wednesday.

Sunday's New York Marathon will go on as scheduled, but Wednesday night's Halloween parade through Greenwich Village has been postponed. On Broadway, shows that had been canceled since Sunday were due to mostly resume on Wednesday, the Theater League announced.

Sandy hit the East Coast with a week to go before the Nov. 6 presidential election, dampening an unprecedented drive to encourage early voting and raising questions whether some polling stations will be ready to open on Election Day.

Obama faces political danger if the government fails to respond well, as was the case with his predecessor George W. Bush's botched handling of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Obama and Romney put campaigning on hold for a second day on Tuesday, but Romney planned to hold rallies in the battleground state of Florida on Wednesday and Obama will resume campaigning on Thursday with a stop in Nevada.

As Region Struggles for Footing, Some Transit Is Restored

As Region Struggles for Footing, Some Transit Is Restored

By JAMES BARRON

Published: October 31, 2012 10 Comments

Still hobbled by power failures and waterlogged transit, the New York region started to restore some transportation services on Wednesday, as it struggled to return to daily life during a daunting period of recovery.

The extent of the challenge was apparent during the morning commute, which quickly froze to gridlock. People who normally took the subway or regional rail lines were forced into taxis or their own cars, clogging the streets. Drivers reported delays of hours, with vehicles lined up at the major crossings and at parking garages.

But by early afternoon, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo had announced that limited service would be restored to two commuter rail lines for the city’s suburbs — the Metro-North Railroad and the Long Island Rail Road — starting at 2 p.m. There would be limited subway service beginning Thursday, with a bus bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan, but no service below 34th Street.

Mr. Cuomo said a major problem continued to be water-filled subway tunnels. That, too, remained a problem for the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, connecting Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Getting water out of the tunnels, he said, was “one of the main orders of business.”

More than 4,000 cabs, which for the moment could be shared among harried commuters, offered another partial lifeline to those cut off by the continued suspension of subway service. Some ferries were expected to be crossing between New Jersey and Manhattan.

In a briefing, Mr. Cuomo said that the Queens-Midtown Tunnel was still closed, contributing to the high volume of traffic, and that traffic signals were still out. Power restoration was being worked on. The greatest challenge was on Long Island, and utility workers were being brought in from upstate to help.

“These are significant challenges,” he said.

But in other ways the city slowly went back to business. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg rang the bell to open the New York Stock Exchange after a two-day closing, the first for weather-related reasons since 1888, as Wall Street and other businesses began to shake off the storm and return to work.

Newark Liberty International Airport opened at 7 a.m., and Kennedy International Airport also resumed operations, but many airlines were still working on a limited basis. La Guardia Airport, which sustained damage, remained closed.

State courtrooms in the city were also reopening. Connecticut, New Jersey and New York began reopening many closed roads and bridges on Tuesday.

Yet schools, parks and East River tunnels remained closed in the city, and many residents up and down the mid-Atlantic still stumbled through their morning routines with candles, flashlights or in darkness.

Amtrak said it would provide modified Northeast Regional service from Newark to points south.

President Obama approved disaster declarations for New York and New Jersey, making them eligible for federal assistance for rebuilding. “All of us have been shocked by the force of mother nature,” said the president, who was expected to visit Atlantic City on Wednesday. He promised “all available resources” for recovery efforts.

“This is going to take some time,” Mr. Obama said. “It is not going to be easy for these communities to recover.”

In Hoboken, N.J., a city of 50,000 people across the Hudson River from Manhattan, local officials issued dire warnings about thousands of people stranded by flooding, and the National Guard began moving in on Wednesday morning to try to rescue them.

“Keep an eye out, go down to the lowest possible floor, but do not go outside,” the city said on its Facebook page. “Signal to get their attention.”

The toll — in lives disrupted or lost and communities washed out — was staggering. A rampaging fire reduced more than 100 houses to ash in Breezy Point, Queens. Explosions and downed power lines left the lower part of Manhattan and 90 percent of Long Island in the dark. The New York City subway system was paralyzed by flooded tunnels and was expect to remain silent for days.

Accidents claimed at least 59 lives in the United States, including 22 in the city, according to The Associated Press. Two boys — an 11-year-old Little League star and a 13-year-old friend — were killed when a 90-foot-tall tree smashed into the family room of a house in North Salem, N.Y. An off-duty police officer who led seven relatives, including a 15-month-old boy, to safety in the storm drowned when he went to check on the basement.

There was no immediate estimate of the losses from the storm, but the scope of the damage — covering more than a half-dozen states — pointed to tens of billions of dollars. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey called it “incalculable.”

Rescuers looked for survivors in the drenched rubble in places like Atlantic City, and state and local officials surveyed wreckage. Utility crews began working their way through a wilderness of fallen trees and power lines. And from Virginia to Connecticut, there were stories of tragedy and survival — of people who lost everything when the water rushed in, of buildings that crumbled after being pounded hour after hour by rain and relentless wind, of hospitals that had to be evacuated when the storm knocked out the electricity.

Mr. Obama spoke with 20 governors and mayors on a conference call Tuesday, and the White House said he would survey damage from the storm with Mr. Christie on Wednesday. The White House said Mr. Obama would join Mr. Christie, who has been one of his harshest Republican critics, in talking with storm victims and thanking first responders.

The president had also offered to visit the city, Mr. Bloomberg said, “but I think the thing for him to do is to go to New Jersey and represent the country.”

Mr. Bloomberg said 7,000 trees had been knocked down in city parks. “Stay away from city parks,” he said. “They are closed until further notice.”

The mayor also said that trick-or-treating was fine for Halloween, but the parade in Greenwich Village had been postponed. The organizers said it was the first time in the parade’s 39-year-history that it had been called off.

But many were expected to be relieved at the restoration of some of the subway service. The network, which suffered the worst damage in its 108-year-history, faced one of its longest shutdowns because the problems were so much worse than expected, said Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman and chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the agency that runs the subways and several commuter railroads.

Water climbed to the ceiling of the South Ferry subway station, the end of the No. 1 line in Lower Manhattan, and debris covered tracks in stations up and down other lines after the water rushed in and out. Mr. Lhota said that seven subway tunnels between Manhattan and Brooklyn were flooded.

The Long Island Rail Road’s West Side Yards had to be evacuated, and two railroad tunnels beneath the East River were flooded in the storm. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel also remained impassable, he said.

The flooding in the tunnels in Lower Manhattan was so serious that the Federal Emergency Management Agency asked specialists from the Army Corps of Engineers to help. The “unwatering team,” as it is known — two hydrologists and two mechanical engineers from the corps with experience in draining flooded areas — flew to the airport in White Plains because it was one of the few in the area that was open.

From southern New Jersey to the East End of Long Island to the northern suburbs in Connecticut, power companies spent Tuesday trying to figure out just how much damage the storm had done to their wires, transformers and substations.

The work will take at least a week, possibly longer, because the damage was so extensive, and utility companies called in thousands of crews from all around the country to help out. Consolidated Edison reached to San Francisco to bring in 150 workers from Pacific Gas and Electric.

Even with the additional staffing, Con Edison said it could still take more than 10 days to complete the repairs. Con Edison had more than 285,000 customers in Manhattan who were in the dark on Tuesday, and more than 185,000 in Westchester.

Things were worse east of New York City, where nearly one million customers of the Long Island Power Authority did not have power on Tuesday and Mr. Cuomo made clear he wanted the authority to restore power faster than it had in the past. He said it was “not O.K.” for it to take two weeks to repair lines brought down by tree limbs.

In New Jersey, Public Service Electric and Gas said it had 1.3 million electric customers in the dark, including 500,000 without power because a surge in Newark Bay flooded substations and other equipment. Another New Jersey utility, Jersey Central Power and Light, whose territory covers many shore towns, said almost all of its customers had lost power in some counties, including Ocean and Monmouth. More than one-third of Connecticut Light and Power’s 1.2 million customers had no electricity, either.

A Far-Reaching System Leaves 8 Million Without Power

A Far-Reaching System Leaves 8 Million Without Power

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: October 30, 2012

SCRANTON, Pa. — The reach of the storm called Sandy was staggering, with devastation along the coasts, snow in Appalachia, power failures in Maine and high winds at the Great Lakes.

In West Virginia, two feet of snow fell in Terra Alta, where Carrie Luckel said she had to take drastic measures to stay warm. “We are seriously using a turkey fryer to keep our bedroom warm enough to live and a Coleman stove in our bedroom to heat up cans of soup,” Ms. Luckel said. “Our milk is sitting on the roof.”

Along the shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago, gawkers who had come to see the crash of 20-foot waves were struggling against gusts that the National Weather Service said could reach 60 miles per hour. “It’s hard to even stand there and look,” said Mike Magic, 36.

The storm was very unlike last year’s deluging Hurricane Irene, which caused severe flooding across many states. The relative lack of rain and the weakening of the storm as it progresses means that the worst damage — and the historic significance — of this storm will be its battering effect on the East Coast, said Brian McNoldy, a hurricane expert at the University of Miami. “Irene will be remembered only for its rain, and Sandy will be remembered only for its surge,” he said.

While the storm has weakened as it moved inland, its winds downed trees and caused some eight million utility customers to lose power. Coastal flooding hit Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and the storm left local flooding in its wake across Delaware, Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. In Maryland, the sewage treatment plant for Howard County lost power, and about two million gallons of water and untreated sewage poured into the Patuxent River hourly. Still, Gov. Martin O’Malley said the state was “very, very fortunate to be on the kinder end of this very violent storm.”

Forecasters said on Tuesday that they no longer expected the storm to turn to the northeast and travel across New England. Instead, the track shifted well to the west, and prediction models suggested a path through central Pennsylvania and western New York State before entering southern Ontario by Wednesday, said Eric Blake, a hurricane specialist with the National Hurricane Center in Miami.

In Scranton, residents enjoyed the relief that comes whenever bullets have been dodged.

“People around here are very concerned about flooding after Irene last year — many people are just recovering,” said Simon Hewson, the general manager at Kildare’s Irish Pub. He prepared the establishment for a severe storm, then “just hunkered down and waited,” said Mr. Hewson, who hails from Dublin. He came in the next morning to an undamaged pub: “We got lucky.”

Experience with natural disaster in an environment that climate change has made increasingly unpredictable has taught strong lessons to many of those who have to deal with storms. Amy Shuler Goodwin, director of communications for the office of Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin of West Virginia, said “without question we are better prepared this time around than last time,” referring to the freakishly powerful “derecho” line of storms that slammed across 700 miles of the Midwest and the mid-Atlantic in July.

As the storm continues to move inland and loses contact with the ocean — its source of moisture — rain levels are expected to diminish, though wind damage is still likely.

When it comes time to assess the damage and help clean up the mess caused by the storm, the Army Corps of Engineers will have plenty of work on its hands, said Col. Kent D. Savre, the commander and division engineer for the corps’ North Atlantic division, whose operations stretch from Virginia to Maine; he expects help from corps districts across the nation: “They kind of come to the sound of the guns when there’s an event like this.”

For some, the storm brought wonder. At LeConte Lodge in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a hike-in set of cabins at 6,600 feet, about 25 visitors huddled around a fire while snow piled up in drifts of up to five feet, said Allyson Virden, who runs the lodge. The 22-inch snowfall is already eleven times greater than the average for October, but Ms. Virden tried looking on the bright side. “We don’t have power to lose up here,” she said. “And it’s gorgeous.”

Reporting was contributed by Brian Stelter from Delaware, Theo Emery from Maryland, John H. Cushman Jr. from Washington, Timothy Williams from New York, Katharine Q. Seelye from Boston, Kim Severson from Atlanta, Steven Yaccino from Chicago and Cynthia McCloud from Terra Alta, W.Va.

When Floodwaters Rise, Web Sites May Fall

When Floodwaters Rise, Web Sites May Fall

By QUENTIN HARDY and JENNA WORTHAM

Published: October 30, 2012

Here is a lesson every Web site manager may be taking away from Hurricane Sandy: It is probably not a good idea to put the backup power generators where it floods.

As computer centers in Lower Manhattan and New Jersey shut down or went to emergency operations after power failures and water damage Monday night, companies scrambled to move the engines of modern communication to other parts of the country. Others rushed to find fuel for backup power generation. In some cases, things just stopped.

“Suddenly, nobody could get online,” said Arianna Huffington, president and chief executive of The Huffington Post, which went offline about 7 p.m. Monday when the computer servers of Datagram, which distribute its work on the Internet, stopped working because of rising water in Lower Manhattan.

About six hours later, Huffington Post was online, but it crashed again several hours later. It was running again at 8 a.m. Tuesday.

As more of life moves online, damage to critical Internet systems affect more of the economy, and disasters like Hurricane Sandy reveal vulnerabilities from the sometimes ad hoc organization of computer networks. In places like Manhattan, advanced technology comes up against aging infrastructure and space constraints, forcing servers and generators to use whatever space is available.

Power is the primary worry, since an abrupt network shutdown can destroy data, but problems can also stem from something as simple as not keeping a crisis plan updated.

“If you have an e-commerce system taking an order from the Web, it may touch 17 servers, all in different locations,” said James Staten, an analyst with Forrester Research. One server might contain customer information, he said, while others work with logistics, product availability or billing. “If you don’t list them all as mission critical, you’re in trouble when disaster occurs.”

Big nationwide providers of Internet service, like Google and Amazon Web Services, were for the most part unaffected by the storm. Their cavernous facilities, holding more than 100,000 computer servers each, were located out of the storm’s path, and had extensive backup power generation. Amazon’s facilities in Virginia, which had been affected in a storm last summer, had no problems.

The largest telecommunications company affected by the storm appeared to be Verizon, which lost a considerable amount of old-fashioned wired phone service to the flooding. Bill Kula, a Verizon spokesman, said the storm surge from the hurricane flooded its central offices in Lower Manhattan, Queens and Long Island, causing power failures. Cellphone service at both AT&T and Verizon Wireless appeared to be less affected.

In the days leading to the hurricane, the carriers staged fleets of emergency response vehicles — trucks that act as temporary cell towers — in strategic locations along the storm’s edge. They also took safety measures, like installing backup batteries on cell sites and moving important equipment to less vulnerable areas. They advised customers to use text messaging instead of placing phone calls to use fewer network resources.

Large companies avoided problems by moving data and people out of town before the hurricane hit, using specialized nationwide service providers.

“They fan out across the U.S.,” said Nick Magliato, chief operations officer of SunGuard. “They move data from New York to Philadelphia, Philadelphia to Phoenix.” His company also provides offices for workers across the country, with computers that replicate their office systems and phones that have their personal numbers.

Peer 1 Hosting, like many other service providers, updated customers via its blog Tuesday. Robert Miggins, senior vice president for business development, said the main options for customers were to shut down in an orderly way, preserving data, risk staying online, or consider moving data to Peer 1’s computers in other parts of the country. “We’re telling them to back up everything,” he said, “sometimes they are dealing with us with nothing but a smartphone.”

Besides Huffington Post, Internet media sites including Gawker and BuzzFeed were taken out by the flooding at the Internet services company Datagram. The sites later recovered, sometimes with reduced service, by transferring work to other providers in different locations. Services remained intermittent, however.

Datagram executives could not be reached for comment. According to the company’s Web site, flooding in the basement of its facilities at 33 Whitehall Street, in Lower Manhattan, damaged the building’s electrical system. The site said Datagram’s computers were not affected.

Many companies affected by the storm and its aftermath built out distributed virtual networks of people, as well. Ben Smith, the editor of BuzzFeed, said that engineers worked throughout the night to shift the site to Amazon Web Services. Mr. Smith said that one man, Eugene Ventimiglia of Emerson, N.J., continued working from home as a tree crashed through his house.

BuzzFeed also rerouted readers to blogs on the Tumblr publishing service, in order to maintain social distribution of its content while its own site was down. Despite the power failures, Mr. Smith said, BuzzFeed still received about two million unique visitors on Monday.

Providers of critical Internet services to business in the area will be set back until full power is restored. A large building on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, owned by Google which houses several other service providers as well, was relying on a 90,000-gallon tank of diesel fuel to run emergency operations, according to one of the building’s tenants.

“We’re good for about 72 hours at a full load of customers,” said Ron Sterbenz, vice president for marketing at Telx, which maintains data services for financial companies and communications providers from the facility. “We don’t know when the power will be back up.” Google would not comment on its building’s operations.

Another downtown building, at 75 Broad Street, had one generator in the basement, which was damaged by water. There is another generator, but it is on a higher floor.

“We’re on a very limited amount of fuel,” said Mr. Miggins of Peer 1, which maintains computers there. “We’ve got a truck full of diesel pulled up to the building, and now we’re trying to figure out how to get fuel up to the 19th floor.”

Sandy's cold punch to Western Maryland: 3 feet of snow, no power

Sandy's cold punch to Western Maryland: 3 feet of snow, no power

By Richard Simon

November 1, 2012, 3:08 p.m.

WASHINGTON — Don’t forget western Maryland.

While New York and New Jersey are struggling after Hurricane Sandy, so is western Maryland, which received up to 3 feet of snow from the super storm, knocking out power to more than half of 31,000 residents and blocking many roads.

"We’re used to snow, but we’ve never had anything like this," R. Lamont "Monty" Pagenhardt, Garrett County administrator, told the Los Angeles Times.

"It’s really bad."

With power out to many homes and streets blocked by snow and downed trees, National Guard troops are beginning to go door to door to check on residents.

Gov. Martin O'Malley, who visited Garrett County on Thursday, told radio station WBAL, "A lot of times, once we clear a road, a new crop of trees has fallen on the road."

"We all had our eyes on the coast…. But the snow that came in with the left jab from Mother Nature really hit Garrett County hard," O’Malley added.

New concerns are the threatened loss of the 911 emergency phone system and flooding. No deaths have been reported.

Pagenhardt has had no power in his home since Monday night.

"It took me a day and a half to get out of my road," he said. "I had to cut trees and get my friend with a four-wheeler to come drag the trees out of the way."

"We've had 300 inches of snow in a year and been fine," he said. "But this, with the downed trees and the lack of power for a lot of our people, it makes it really, really bad."

Still, he said, "The community is pulling together.’’

After Sandy, gasoline's at a premium in New York and New Jersey

After Sandy, gasoline's at a premium in New York and New Jersey

November 1, 2012, 3:04 p.m.

WANTAGH, N.Y. -- Ever since the power came on at the gas station early Wednesday, Billy O'Mahoney has been taking calls from neighbors, customers, cousins and distant relatives all asking the same question: "You got gas?"

The tanks went dry in four hours on Wednesday, two days after Hurricane Sandy swept through. The station's supply normally lasts two or three days.

"It's like gold right now," said O'Mahoney, the service manager at the Wantagh Car Care Center in Wantagh, N.Y., about nine miles inland from communities on the south shore of Long Island that were hammered by Sandy.

Even with the electricity coming on in more and more neighborhoods and towns in the interior of Long Island, the island is starting to run out of gas entirely.

"My supplier says it will be two or three days until we get gas," said O'Mahoney. The tanks at the main petroleum terminals dotted across the island were allowed to go dry before the storm came in to prevent a possible environmental disaster. Now, the network of gas distributors on the island are waiting for barges to arrive from refineries to replenish the terminals.

New York is not alone. In New Jersey, long gas lines are the order of the day -- largely a result of breakdowns in the infrastructure that supplies the fuel.

About 80% of New Jersey’s 2,944 gas stations are “out of fuel or are out of power and some are unable to sell fuel,” said Tracy Noble, a spokeswoman for AAA Midatlantic and a New Jersey resident. “It’s one of the biggest challenges the state is facing right now.”

Without gas, trucks can't move crews in to clear the roads and repair the power lines and bring food to resupply grocery stores.

O'Mahoney said a customer found someone trying to siphon gas out of a Mercury Tracer wagon parked behind the station.

Dressed in a short-sleeved, blue-collared shirt with "Mobil" embroidered above the pocket, O'Mahoney picks up the station phone one more time.

"No, we don't have gas," he says to his cousin Rocco on the other line. "You don't call to talk? Just when you need gas!"

Gas stations are taking steps to stretch their dwindling reserves, according to AAA's Noble. Some are capping purchases at $20 or $50 a customer. Some sell only to people with small gas cans who are buying fuel for generators. But the falling volumes of gasoline available and the long lines of cars have caused widespread disruption. Even AAA is struggling to get gas for its tow trucks, Noble said.

Demand for gasoline, even under normal conditions, outstrips local refining capacity. About half of New Jersey’s gasoline comes from three refineries in the state, and three near Philadelphia, said Roger Diwan, a partner at PFC Energy, a Washington, D.C. consultant.

New Jersey gets the rest of its gasoline from refineries on the Gulf Coast via the Colonial pipeline, which begins in Houston and ends in New York, and from imports from Europe that arrive at terminals on its coast.

Refineries, terminals, pipelines and gas stations -- which all need electrcity to run -- were hit particularly hard by the power outage caused by the storm. Three of the six refineries have resumed work at normal capacity, one at a reduced capacity, and two remain shut down, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

Many gas stations still lack power as electricity gets restored to higher-priority places such as hospitals. The Colonial pipeline is also shut and it’s unclear when it will restart, the Energy Department said.

The terminals for gasoline imports are also shuttered. It remains unclear how much damage has been done to the terminals and the harbors by Sandy.

If there is a lot of floating debris, tankers might be unwilling to ply the waters, Diwan said.

Two major ports for gasoline that are closed are Arthur Kill, a waterway between New Jersey and Staten Island, and Bayonne, N.J., where power outages are widespread.

“The terminals' and harbor’s key infrastructure may have been badly affected and we don’t know how badly yet,” Diwan said.

While demand has plummeted because people are staying home and flights have been grounded, enough people are getting out, searching for gasoline, that long lines have sprung up at the few places where fuel is available and pumps working.

As Recovery Continues, City’s Death Toll Reaches 38

As Recovery Continues, City’s Death Toll Reaches 38

By JOSEPH GOLDSTEIN and CHRISTINE HAUSER

Published: November 1, 2012 356 Comments

The number of New York City fatalities from Hurricane Sandy jumped to 38 on Thursday, including two young boys who were swept from the arms of their mother on Staten Island and found dead at the swampy end of a street, the police said.

The mother, Glenda Moore, told the police that her sons, Connor, 4, and Brandon, 2, were swept away on Monday shortly after 6 p.m. as the storm arrived. The mother and children had been leaving Staten Island, heading for Brooklyn, as their car was disabled by water, the police said. Ms. Moore, 39, got out of her car with her two sons, near Father Capodanno Boulevard, when a surge of water caused her to lose grip of her children, the police said.

The two children were found at the end of McLaughlin Street, said Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the New York Police Department.

“We just brought the parents into a trailer for the awful duty of identifying their little ones,” Mr. Browne wrote in an e-mail.

The grim discovery was made as New York City and areas in more than half a dozen states pressed on with efforts to make a full accounting of the destruction wrought by Hurricane Sandy. The extent of the storm’s destructive force was reflected in government briefings that addressed a sweeping range of loss that included the human toll, power failures, homes sucked into the ocean, ruined businesses, and broken infrastructure and housing that put millions of people out of work and shelter.

The storm was blamed for more than 80 deaths in the United States, including the 38 in New York City that was announced on Thursday, updating the toll of 24 given on Wednesday. In the region, there were at least 8 in New Jersey and 4 in Connecticut, and numbers are expected to climb as rescue crews uncover the full scale of the damage to buildings and infrastructure. In New York City, the police said 19 victims were from Staten Island, 9 from Queens, 7 from Brooklyn and 3 in Manhattan.

Three days after the storm hit New York, it is becoming clear how most victims died. “The majority of them drowned,” said Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office.

Previously reported deaths included a woman electrocuted as she walked in Queens and numerous people killed by falling trees. But as rescue crews searched the eastern edge of Staten Island on Thursday, particularly in and around the Midland Beach neighborhood, they discovered numerous drowning victims.

On Thursday, an elderly couple were found dead in their car on Staten Island.

In a briefing on Thursday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that parks and playgrounds would reopen on Saturday, and public schools on Monday. He said the city would distribute meals and water around the city, including at sites in the Rockaways, Coney Island and parts of Staten Island, on Thursday.

“New York is starting to build again,” he said.

People still coped with the loss of everyday essentials — elevators, lights, cellphone service, Wi-Fi, refrigeration, hot showers.

But the return of some transportation services was cautiously welcomed, even as commuters and residents still had to negotiate crawling traffic, half-mile lines at suburban gas stations and city buses stuffed beyond capacity.

Subway service resumed on more than half of the city’s 23 lines, but several — the No. 3 and 7 trains and the B, C, E, G and Q trains — remained dark. Many trains will have large gaps in their routes, including the No. 4 train, which will have no service between 42nd Street in Manhattan and Borough Hall in Brooklyn because of flooding in its tunnel beneath the East River and power problems. Subways and buses will be free for the rest of the week.

Shuttle buses are linking the boroughs from the transportation hub at the Barclays Center and from Hewes Street on the border of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn. Vehicle traffic on city streets was exceptionally heavy as drivers tried to make it into Manhattan before 6 a.m., when the city required at least three people in cars entering Manhattan over the Robert F. Kennedy, Manhattan, Brooklyn and Williamsburg Bridges, but not the George Washington Bridge.

While traffic had cleared up in some areas, much of the region’s arterial system remained a parking lot well past the typical morning commute.

Police checkpoints set up in many places to enforce the high-occupancy-vehicle rule were so rigorous that they seemed to have the unintended effect of clogging up traffic flow even more, with lines of cars stretching from the Brooklyn Bridge to Staten Island.

But it could be easier to get a view from 30,000 feet on Thursday as air travel eased. La Guardia Airport, which had been shut down because of flooding, reopened. Some flights resumed on Wednesday at Kennedy International and Newark Liberty International Airports.

Some service was also restored on the AirTrain to Kennedy Airport, which connects the subway and train complex in Jamaica, Queens, to the airport. Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road had limited service to New York’s northern and eastern suburbs.

Still, navigating transportation on the streets seemed to require the most diplomacy and luck as commuters adjusted to new rhythms of supply and demand.

The mayor had lifted the three-occupant limit for taxis and livery cars coming into Manhattan around 8:15 a.m. But even before that, some commuters attempted cab sharing, the delicate art of piling into a yellow taxi with strangers, which some cabdrivers declined to accommodate. A popular mode of transportation in Lower Manhattan — still dark from the loss of power — appeared to be bicycles.

There was limited ferry service in the East River, and the Staten Island Ferry should start plying the waterways within the next day or so, with a full schedule expected on Saturday.

Attesting to the scale of the recovery, more than 3.75 million people were hit by power failures from the storm, which made landfall on Monday night but was preceded by punishing winds, storm surges and torrential rain.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a Twitter message that as of 9 a.m. Thursday, more than 1.58 million New Yorkers were without electricity, including more than 600,000 in the New York City area and more than 700,000 on Long Island. Consolidated Edison said Thursday that it had restored power to more than 225,000 customers since the storm ended.

There was also more bad news for residents who receive electricity through overhead lines: Con Ed did not expect to restore power to all those customers until the end of next week. The utility has said that power for customers whose lines are underground will be restored sooner, and within the next few days in the case of Lower Manhattan, according to Mr. Bloomberg.

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said Tuesday that he expected PATH trains to be unavailable for at least 7 to 10 days.

Work on the seven flooded tunnels beneath the East River caused delays. The Brooklyn-Battery, Queens-Midtown and Holland Tunnels remain closed.

More Subway Service Restored

4:25 pm Matt Flegenheimer

More Subway Service Restored

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced some new additions to its list of returning train service on Thursday night.

Some M train service was restored earlier on Thursday between Jamaica and 34th Street, the authority said. By midnight, the authority expected No. 7 trains to run from Main Street to 74th Street in Queens. And the authority’s chairman, Joseph J. Lhota, said at a news briefing Thursday night that once power is restored in Lower Manhattan, service on No. 4 and 5 trains can return between Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Pumping Water From Subway Tunnels

4:09 pm Robert Mackey

Pumping Water From Subway Tunnels

At a briefing on Thursday evening, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, described the daunting task of pumping water out of transit tunnels before power can be turned back on to get the entire subway system back in operation.

The M.T.A. released video of pumping at the flooded South Ferry station on Thursday. Video of water being pumped out of the flooded subway station at South Ferry in Lower Manhattan on Thursday.

Mr. Cuomo also described the scale of the task ahead to restore all transportation links, including clearing out a mile of water in the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, known officially as the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel in memory of a former governor, and about five miles of water in the PATH tubes that connect Manhattan to New Jersey along the Hudson riverbed.

Fuel Shortage Could Make Taxis Even Harder to Come By

2:58 pm Matt Flegenheimer

Fuel Shortage Could Make Taxis Even Harder to Come By

With a gas shortage besetting commuters across the region, even nondrivers could feel the pain on Friday. David S. Yassky, the city’s taxi commissioner, said the shortage “will definitely reduce the number of cabs” on Friday if more fuel does not become available.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that New York Harbor had been reopened, which he expected would help bolster the fuel supply.

A state-by-state look at superstorm’s effects

A state-by-state look at superstorm’s effects

Associated Press Fri Nov 2, 2012 12:20 AM

The massive storm that started out as Hurricane Sandy slammed into the East Coast and morphed into a huge and problematic system, killing at least 90 people in the United States. Power outages now stand at more than 4 million homes and businesses, down from a peak of 8.5 million. Here’s a snapshot of what is happening, state by state.

CONNECTICUT

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano says the federal government will offer as much help as it can to Connecticut homeowners and business owners affected by the Superstorm Sandy. She toured the state’s storm-battered shoreline by helicopter Thursday with Gov. Dannel P. Malloy and other government officials. Deaths: 3. Power outages: 350,000, down from a peak of 625,000.

DELAWARE

Governor lifts state of emergency and authorizes National Guard to continue cleanup support. Shelters close. Deaths: none. Power outages: 550, down from more than 45,000.

KENTUCKY

The last remnants of Sandy drop more snow in the mountains on top of a foot that already fell. Deaths: none. Power outages: none.

MAINE

Amtrak’s Downeaster resumes service. Governor sends forest rangers to New York City to help with recovery there. Deaths: none. Power outages: none, down from more than 90,000.

MARYLAND

Residents return to polls after storm forced cancellation of early voting for two days. Deaths: 4. Power outages: 22,000, down from 365,700.

MASSACHUSETTS

Storm shifted a dead whale that had been left to rot on the shoreline to a spot where scientists can now recover the bones before it is buried. Deaths: none. Power outages: 7,200, down from 400,000.

MICHIGAN

Cargo shipping on the Great Lakes resumes after high waves subside. Deaths: none. Power outages: 5,000, down from 154,000.

NEW HAMPSHIRE

Surprise “microburst” from vestiges of storm topples pines onto lake cottages. Trick-or-treating postponed to Sunday. Deaths: 1. Power outages: 2,600, down from 210,000.

NEW JERSEY

Motorists across New Jersey were in long lines at gas stations for a second stressful day on Thursday. Many stations were closed because of a lack of electricity or supplies, or both. At a Gulf station in Newark, a police officer directed traffic as a line of vehicles stretched for about two miles. Deaths: 14. Power outages: 1.6 million, down from 2.7 million.

NEW YORK

Police say the bodies of two missing New York City boys have been found. The 2- and 4-year-olds disappeared Monday night when waves crashed into an SUV being driven by their mother in Staten Island. The U.S. Coast Guard opened the Port of New York and New Jersey on a restricted basis to get gasoline and fuel to the areas hit hardest. Deaths: 46, including 39 in New York City. Power outages: 1.51 million, down from 2.2 million.

NORTH CAROLINA

The U. S. Coast Guard halts its search for the captain of a tall ship that sank. Deaths: 2. Power outages: mostly restored.

OHIO

Cleanup begins after another day of steady rains and gusty winds that led to flood warnings along Lake Erie. Deaths: 2. Power outages: 89,000, down from more than 250,000.

PENNSYLVANIA

Utility crews struggle to restore power in state where most damage was driven by wind, not water. Deaths: 12. Power outages: 384,000, down from 1.2 million.

RHODE ISLAND

Officials say Federal Emergency Management Agency crews are assessing storm damage in Rhode Island. That’s one of the first steps that must occur before the president can declare the state a disaster area, which would allow governments and homeowners to apply for federal assistance. About half of Newport’s 3.5-mile Cliff Walk has been closed because of extensive damage. Deaths: none. Power outages: 25,000, down from more than 122,000.

TENNESSEE

Elizabethton businesses close off a street and cover sidewalks for trick-or-treaters as snow falls in mountainous areas. Deaths: none. Power outages: minimal.

VERMONT

Amtrak works to restore service to the state after tracks were damaged in other areas. Deaths: none. Power outages: mostly restored, down from more than 10,000.

VIRGINIA

National Guard winds down most recovery operations. U.S. Navy sends three Virginia-based ships toward the Northeast in case they’re needed. Deaths: 2. Power outages: 6,100, down from more than 180,000.

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Early voting resumes after being shut down for two days, and hours are extended. Federal workers return, National Mall reopens. Deaths: none. Power outages: mostly restored, down from 25,000.

WEST VIRGINIA

Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin plans to ask President Barack Obama for a federal disaster declaration to help residents and businesses in the hardest-hit areas of the state. Some areas have seen nearly 3 feet of snow. Deaths: 6. Power outages: 136,875, down from about 271,000.

Sandy recovery: Scope of devastation widens, tempers flare

Sandy recovery: Scope of devastation widens, tempers flare

11:14 a.m. CDT, November 2, 2012

New York— Four days after superstorm Sandy smashed into the U.S. Northeast, rescuers on Friday were still discovering the extent of the death and devastation in New York and the New Jersey shore, and anger mounted over gasoline shortages, power outages and waits for relief supplies.

Motorists increasingly desperate for a fill-up fumed in long lines at gas stations and screamed at each as fuel shortages spread across the New York City area.

MARATHON CRITICISM

A backlash appeared to be building against Mayor Michael Bloomberg's decision to hold the New York City Marathon on Sunday as scheduled, with some New Yorkers complaining that going ahead with the 26.2-mile race would be insensitive and divert city resources at a time when many are suffering.

DEATH TOLL NEARING 100

Four days after Sandy slammed the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, the U.S. death toll climbed past 90 in 10 states, and included two boys who were torn from their mother's grasp by rushing floodwaters in Staten Island during the storm. Their bodies were found in a marshy area on Thursday.

At least 19 people have been killed in Staten Island, about half the death toll for all of New York City.

Garbage is piling up, a stench hangs in the air and mud-caked mattresses and couches line the streets. Residents picked through their belongings, searching for anything that could be salvaged.

“We have hundreds of people in shelters,” said James Molinaro, the borough's president.

Molinaro complained the American Red Cross “is nowhere to be found,” and some residents questioned what they called the lack of a response by government disaster relief agencies.

A relief fund is being created just for storm survivors on Staten Island, Molinaro and former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Friday. And Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and a top Federal Emergency Management Agency official planned to tour the island.

4-HOUR WAITS FOR GASOLINE

With fuel deliveries in the East disrupted by storm damage and many gas stations lacking electricity to run their pumps, gasoline became a precious commodity, especially for those who depend on their cars for their livelihoods.

Some drivers complained of waiting three and four hours in line, only to see the pumps run out when it was almost their turn. Cars ran out of gas before they reached the front of the line. Police officers were assigned to gas stations to maintain order. In Queens, a man was charged Thursday with flashing a gun at another motorist who complained he was cutting in line.

BLACKOUTS STILL AFFECTING MILLIONS

More 3.8 million homes and business in the East were still without power, down from a peak of 8.5 million. But across the New York metropolitan area, there were more signs that life was beginning to return to something approaching normal.

Consolidated Edison, the power company serving New York, said electricity should be restored by Saturday to customers in Manhattan and to homes and offices served by underground power lines in Brooklyn. More subway and rail lines started operating again Friday, and the Holland Tunnel into New York was open to buses.

In New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie said Atlantic City's 12 casinos could reopen immediately after a nearly five-day shutdown for Superstorm Sandy. Sandy slammed into the shoreline Monday night just a few miles from Atlantic City, which was flooded and lost an old section of its word-famous boardwalk but fared much better than other parts of New Jersey's coast. There was increasing worry about the elderly. Community groups have been going door-to-door on the upper floors of darkened Manhattan apartment buildings, and city workers and volunteer in hard-hit Newark, N.J., delivered meals to senior citizens and others stuck in their buildings.

“It's been mostly older folks who aren't able to get out,” said Monique George of Manhattan-based Community Voices Heard.

ANGER AND POLITICS

Scenes of angry storm victims could complicate matters for politicians, from President Barack Obama just four days before the general election, to governors and mayors in the most heavily populated region in the United States. Obama so far has received praise for his handling of Sandy.

COLDER WEATHER AHEAD

Forecasts for colder temperatures only added to the tension, since many in New Jersey and elsewhere have been using fuel-powered generators to run lights and heaters while waiting for utilities to repair downed power lines.

While power was expected to be returned throughout Manhattan by Saturday, it could be another week or more in suburbs and more distant towns along the coast. About 4.5 million homes and businesses in 15 U.S. states remain without power.

COSTLY CATASTROPHE

The financial cost of the storm promised to be staggering. Disaster modeling company Eqecat estimated Sandy caused up to $20 billion in insured losses and $50 billion in economic losses, double its previous forecast.

At the high end of the range, Sandy would rank as the fourth costliest U.S. catastrophe ever, according to the Insurance Information Institute, behind Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the September 11, 2001, attacks and Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

The Associated Press and Reuters contributed.

Marathon Presses On in Face of Growing Opposition

Marathon Presses On in Face of Growing Opposition

By KEN BELSON

Published: November 2, 2012

Two days before nearly 50,000 runners are scheduled to gather in Staten Island for the start of the New York City Marathon, opposition to the race continued to swell Friday and the Police Department, stretched thin from handling relief efforts, has called for department retirees to help with storm work and the marathon on Sunday.

Debate over whether to hold the race began soon after Hurricane Sandy hit the region Monday night. Critics have said that it is in poor taste to hold a race through the five boroughs while people are trying to cope with the storm’s aftermath and that city services should focus on storm relief, not the marathon. Proponents of the marathon believe the race will provide a needed morale boost, as well as an economic one.

Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, was the latest in an increasingly long line of public officials to call for the marathon to be postponed or canceled. In a statement Friday, Stringer said that “New York has experienced a tragedy of historic proportions” and residents in many hard-hit areas of the city “are struggling to keep body and soul together, deprived of basic essentials as temperatures drop.”

Stringer said the race should be postponed “to focus all of the city’s resources on the crucial task of helping our neighbors recover from this disaster.”

The likely Democratic candidates for mayor of New York have offered their opinions. William C. Thompson said the race should be canceled because “our neighbors are hurting and our city needs to make them its priority.” John Liu, the comptroller, told Reuters that it should go on because “it’s a big economic generator.” Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, also supported the decision to hold the race, saying, “The event is a city institution that delivers tremendous economic activity.”

The comments by elected officials were echoed by thousands of people on social media. While some support Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s notion that the marathon can help get the city back on its feet, many others are disgusted that precious public resources will be used for a sporting event while millions of New Yorkers are without power, heat and food. Several online petitions and message boards have sprung up with thousands of signatures calling for the marathon to be postponed or canceled.

“This will forever tarnish the marathon as a brand and an event,” said Stephen Robert Morse, a 27-year-old from Brooklyn who started stopthemarathon.tumblr.com. “There are still thousands of people downtown and businesses that still lack necessities and it’s insulting to have tourists prioritized over the people of this city.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, aware that the marathon generates hundreds of millions of dollars for the city, has repeatedly said the race will go on. He did not expect the Police Department to be overly burdened because the race is on a Sunday, when street traffic is limited. Many parts of the city, including Lower Manhattan, are expected to have their power back, freeing other workers.

“The city is a city where we have to go on,” Bloomberg said at a news conference Thursday.

While the mayor has said the marathon will not siphon police resources from the storm relief effort, the Police Department has reached out to department retirees to help with storm work and the marathon. “We would begin deployments starting with the NYC Marathon and other assignments to assist the Department thereafter,” the department’s personnel bureau wrote in an e-mail to retirees.

Roy Richter, president of the New York Police Department Captains Endowment Association, said that in a normal year, maintaining order at the marathon “is a tremendous tax on the resources on the Police Department.” The police presence at this year’s race will be smaller than in the past “because of the severe strain on the department right now,” said Richter, who was living in a shelter in Rockaway because his home in Breezy Point, Queens, was destroyed.

While he was confident that the police officers at the race would do a good job, those officers would not be able to work in the “tremendous number of diverse communities that have been devastated,” he said.

In a typical year, about 1,000 full-time police officers and 500 auxiliary officers are stationed along the 26.2-mile course, which touches all five boroughs. (New York Road Runners, which puts on the race, also hires private security for the race.) But many officers are now working 12-hour shifts maintaining order in hard-hit neighborhoods, at gas stations and elsewhere. Some officers themselves may be without power at home, compounding the strain.

“They would be lucky to get the 500 auxiliary cops this time, especially if they don’t have their uniforms because their homes were washed-out,” said one retired police officer who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Many retired officers might not have kept their uniforms even before the storm, he added. “It’s not like there are nasty crowds at the marathon, but with crowd control, you get the usual frustration.”

Working traffic detail at the race is only one role the Police Department fills. Teams of officers must also supervise the installation of barriers along the course as well as posting signs telling residents to remove their cars. In the hours before the race, illegally parked cars are towed.

Mary Wittenberg, chief executive of New York Road Runners, defended Bloomberg’s decision to hold the race, saying it would be used as a platform to lift spirits and raise money. Her organization plans to donate $1 million, or $26.20 for every runner who starts the race, to relief efforts in the city. The Rudin Family and ING, two sponsors of the race, will donate a combined $1.6 million to storm relief. Road Runners is working to donate other supplies to relief efforts.

George Hirsch, the chairman of the board of Road Runners, acknowledged that running the marathon could be viewed as trivial and even a drain in light of the devastation in and around New York. But he expected the race to galvanize the city much as it did after the terrorist attacks in September 2001.

“I understand the controversy completely and respect all the views on this, but any decision that was made by the mayor would have been controversial and to call off the race would have been equally controversial,” Hirsch said. “By Sunday afternoon, there won’t be any controversy. People will view it as an early step in the city’s recovery.”

New York’s marathon is the world’s largest, but this year the race will be noticeably smaller. Hirsch said he expected about 40,000 runners to begin the race, about 15 percent below what had initially been expected.

Wittenberg said Road Runners had “essentially canceled” nearly everything on its calendar before the marathon, including a youth event Thursday, the opening ceremony in Central Park on Friday and the Dash to the Finish Line 5K on Saturday, which would have been run through Midtown.

Some runners are torn about taking part. Simon Ressner, a lieutenant in the Fire Department, said that police officers, firefighters and emergency medical technicians are often needed unexpectedly in a disaster situation like this one. He noted that at least four police officers were at a gas station that he passed Thursday on the way to evaluate the safety of the burned homes in Breezy Point, Queens. About 300 people had gathered to fill their gas cans, and the police officers were there to control the crowd.

“There’s a concrete example of why you need all the city resources available right now,” said Ressner, who added that he was 80 percent sure he would run Sunday. “I’ve written two e-mails to the Road Runners saying, ‘Just postpone it.’ That way, you’ll still get the money, you’ll still have a high-profile event, but it would show that you’re being sensitive. But now, we’re not going to show the world we’re resilient, we’re going to show them we’re selfish.”

First responders are not the only ones questioning the wisdom of holding the race. People on Staten Island are particularly angry that their borough is being used as a jumping-off point for the race while critical services for those stranded by the storm are not getting through.

Gasoline Runs Short, Adding Woes to Storm Recovery

Gasoline Runs Short, Adding Woes to Storm Recovery

By KATE ZERNIKE

Published: November 2, 2012

Widespread gas shortages stirred fears among residents and disrupted some rescue and emergency services as the New York region continued to struggle on Friday to return to a semblance of normalcy after being ravaged by Hurricane Sandy.

Tiny increments of progress, including a second day of limited subway and bus lines, have been made in the aftermath of what officials are calling the worst storm to hit New York City. But they were overshadowed by new estimates of the storm’s financial cost, struggles to restore power, and by the discovery of more bodies in flooded communities.

On Friday, there was sign of progress in the work to restore power as Consolidated Edison announced that electricity should be restored to a small sliver of Lower Manhattan south of the Brooklyn Bridge by midnight. Most of the rest of Manhattan should get power sometime on Saturday.

Four days after Hurricane Sandy, the effort to secure enough gas for the region moved to the forefront of recovery work. The problems affected even New York City, where the Taxi Commission warned that the suddenly indispensable fleet of yellow cabs would thin significantly Friday because of the fuel shortage. City officials said they reached an agreement with a major supplier Thursday night that would ensure that emergency operations — fire, police, sanitation and work by the parks department to clean up downed trees — would continue uninterrupted.

In Union, N.J., the problem was starkly highlighted on Thursday when lines of cars waiting for gas at a Sunoco ran in three directions: a mile-long line up the Garden State Parkway, a half-mile line along Vauxhall Road, and another, including a fleet of mail trucks that needed to refuel before resuming their rounds, snaking through a back entrance. The scene was being replayed across the state as drivers waited in lines that ran hundreds of vehicles deep, requiring state troopers and local police officers to protect against exploding tempers.

“I’ve been pumping gas for 36 hours; I pumped 17,000 gallons,” said Abhishek Soni, the owner of an Exxon in Montclair, where disputes in the line Wednesday night had become so heated that Mr. Soni called the police and turned off the pumps for 45 minutes to restore calm. “My nose, my mouth is bleeding from the fumes. The fighting just makes it worse.”

Commuters have had to adapt to new rules to get to work with ingenuity and patience. On Friday in New York City, subway trains, pressed back onto the rails on Thursday, continued with limited service, with downtown trains in Manhattan going as far as 34th Street before stopping because of power problems there.

For some commuters emerging from the F line at 63rd Street and Lexington Avenue on Friday morning, commuting sounded like solving a geometry problem. Leslie Watson, 43, a supervisor for AM New York, said that he took the M train over the F line but that he’d normally take the E. Car and bus transportation is sketchy, and there are just two local trains running local.

“Yesterday, there were a couple of people from M.T.A. giving out information, but otherwise, like today, you’re on your own,” Mr. Watson said. “Not bad, but not good. My commute was 12 minutes late.”

Commuters started arriving in large numbers between 5 and 5:30 a.m. at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, where they got on shuttle buses that would take them to Manhattan and connect them with other stops in the transit system, which has been slowly returning to life since Wednesday.

But East River crossings by private passenger car were reportedly slightly more fluid as drivers apparently realized the authorities meant business when they required cars to carry three passengers or more in order to cross into Manhattan. Staten Island ferry service was scheduled to resume routes.

Though Thursday marked the start of the return to routine for many who commute to work or celebrated the resumption of power, the scenes of long lines, fistfights at gas stations and siphoning at parking lots highlighted the difficult, uneven slog to recovery.

On Friday, the Queens district attorney’s office said a St. Albans man had been arrested after he pointed a pistol at a motorist who complained when he tried to cut a line at a gas station. The man, Sean M. Bailey, 35, was charged with second-degree criminal possession of a weapon and second-degree menacing.

Mr. Bailey tried to pull his BMW ahead of another motorist on a gas line on Astoria Boulevard early on Thursday, the district attorney’s office said. When the motorist complained, the district attorney’s office said, Mr. Bailey pointed a gun at him and said, “If you don’t pull back, you’re not getting gas tonight.”

City officials have emphasized they want to get the city back on its feet as soon as possible. In another sign of that, officials announced that the Staten Island Ferry would start operating again on Friday.

The death toll in New York City rose to 38, as rescuers continued to discover bodies while combing through coastal wreckage. Among them were the bodies of two boys, 2 and 4, who had been torn from their mother by raging floodwaters on Staten Island on Monday night.

The losses from the storm will approach $50 billion, according to an early estimate from economists at Moody’s Analytics — about $30 billion in property damage, the rest in lost economic activity like meals and canceled flights.

The lack of power continued to bedevil efforts to address the damage. About 43 percent of customers in New Jersey and about 16 percent in New York State remained without electricity.

On Friday, Con Ed officials said that most customers in the southeastern tip of Manhattan were expected to have power by midnight, and that by Saturday, electricity will be restored throughout Manhattan.

Alfonso Quiroz, a spokesman, said that before the end of the day on Friday, power should be restored to the area roughly south of Frankfort Street, which runs along the roadway leading to the Brooklyn Bridge. In that area, customers east of Broadway will have electricity, but those west of Broadway will be restored by Saturday, although some customers there already have power, he said.

Another spokesman, Allan Drury, said power would be restored by Saturday to all customers in Manhattan who lost their service because of Hurricane Sandy, but other boroughs in New York City would take longer.

The power, commuting and recovery issues were only aggravated by the increasingly short supply of gas, particularly given that many suburban residents in New Jersey and elsewhere were heading to the stations to fuel generators, which provided the lone source of power and heat to homes across the region.

According to figures from AAA, of the gas stations it monitors, roughly 60 percent of stations in New Jersey and 70 percent on Long Island were closed.

At stations that were open, nerves frayed. Fights broke out Thursday at the block-long Hess station on 10th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, forcing the Police Department to send three officers to keep the peace, a police official said. By evening, the police had to close two lanes of the broad thoroughfare to accommodate a line of customers stretching eight blocks, to 37th Street.

The ports and refineries that supply much of the region’s gas had been shut down in advance of the storm and were damaged by it. That disrupted deliveries to gas stations that had power to pump the fuel. But the bigger problem was that many stations and storage facilities remained without power.

Politicians were scrambling Thursday to increase the supply of fuel — the Port of New York and New Jersey opened just enough to allow boats carrying gas to move, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey waived restrictions that make it harder for stations to buy gas from out-of-state suppliers. Mr. Christie’s office had warned that price gougers would be prosecuted, but drivers were reporting that some stations were charging more than $4 a gallon, even though the state had set gas prices at $3.59 on the highways last week.

Mr. Christie said Thursday afternoon that President Obama had sent 250,000 gallons of gas and 500,000 gallons of diesel fuel to the state through the Department of Defense, and he pledged to send more if needed.

Despite these steps the situation was not expected to get significantly better on Friday. Utility companies said power might not be fully restored until late next week.

In Paterson, N.J., the state’s third-largest city, the Police Department was trying to negotiate emergency contracts for gas, and short of that, said it would beginning siphoning it from other city vehicles to keep police cruisers running.

The Essex County executive, Joseph N. DiVincenzo Jr., said that the fuel shortage had become his No. 1 concern, causing officials to start limiting gas half a tank at a time to police and fire vehicles. “All 22 of our municipalities are having problems getting fuel,” he said. “Everyone’s on edge.”

Some drove hours out of their way, across state lines, in search of gas. Others tried their luck at a dozen stations, finding many roped off, or turned to Twitter, trading tips about where lines were long.

That is how Jason Brown, 25, of St. Albans, Queens, learned there might be gas at a BP station two miles away in Valley Stream, Nassau County. He walked there lugging a five-gallon Igloo cooler hoping to fill it with gas for his car — only to find a line stretching a quarter-mile along Sunrise Highway. When the generator pumping the gas failed, the crowd erupted into fights and police officers were called in to close the station.

“I’m trying to get gas for my family,” Mr. Brown said. “Everywhere you go, it’s either a riot or there’s no gas.”

The lines themselves only exacerbated the problem; reports in the local media provoked drivers to buy gasoline before stations ran out. Some spent what fuel they had searching for more and could be seen pushing vehicles toward relief.

“I just want to have it, because you don’t know how long this is going to last,” said Richard Bianchi, waiting in the half-mile line at the Sunoco in Union with a tank that was three-quarters full.

“People are panicking,” said Jimmy Qawasmi, the owner of a Mobil in the Westchester County town of Mamaroneck. “People must have heard something.”

Bloomfield Avenue, a traffic artery connecting several towns in Essex County, N.J., was unusually congested as drivers stopped to lean out their windows at every station: “You got gas?” Mr. Soni’s station in Montclair had received a delivery of 8,000 gallons at 4 p.m. Wednesday, but that had run out by 2:30 a.m. Thursday. A tanker truck passed by, prompting a cheer. “I’m empty!” the driver called out.

Up the road, a tanker turned into one gas station just down from where a crowd was waiting at another. The people waiting dashed across the street, only to see the tanker turn and go to the station where they had been waiting. The police were refusing to let the station open for three hours, but people were determined to hold out.

As Benito Domena, holding two gas cans, said: “The wait is just going to be worse elsewhere.”

Reporting on the storm was contributed by Russ Buettner, Annie Correal, Alison Leigh Cowan, Sheri Fink, Joseph Goldstein, J. David Goodman, Denise Grady, Christine Hauser, Winnie Hu, Randy Leonard, William K. Rashbaum, Ray Rivera, Liz Robbins, Nate Schweber, Kirk Semple, Stacey Stowe, Rebecca White and Vivian Yee.

The Night the Dune Failed

The Night the Dune Failed

Long Beach After Sandy: Residents of Long Beach, N.Y., begin the cleanup after Hurricane Sandy.

By MICHAEL WINERIP

Published: November 2, 2012 18 Comments

LONG BEACH, N.Y. — It is one thing to cover a disaster and it’s another to be the disaster.

I live on this barrier island on the South Shore of Long Island, and Monday night, at about 8, with the electricity out, candles flickering against the pitch black night and Hurricane Sandy bearing down on us, we raised our glasses to the 10-foot-high sand dune at the end of our street.

In beach communities, dunes are held holy, and for the 30 years we’ve lived here, through numerous hurricanes and northeasters, the dune had held back the sea.

“To the dune,” we toasted.

Minutes later, four feet of ocean water came rushing down our street and two of those feet streamed into our first floor.

News.

Within a day — after I’d helped my sons rip out the carpet and pile ruined furniture on the curb — I was running around reporting on the town where I’d raised my four children and made many friends.

First stop was Farrell Street, where seven homes had burned down. Standing out front was Frank Ciccone, an off-duty police officer who lives in the neighborhood. Frank — whose daughter Kristen went to the prom with my son Ben — told me that the fire had started when a car went up in flames. The flood waters reached the car’s battery, which set off sparks that were fanned by the winds, he said. “Fire trucks couldn’t get up the street,” he said. “The water was too high.”

“His house burned down,” he said, pointing to Chris Jones, who worked as a lifeguard with my daughter Annie. Chris had put on a wet suit and paddled a surfboard toward the car, hoping to douse the flames.

Bill Long — a friend of Tom Scully who is a friend of mine — had been planning to go to bed early. “I was just waiting for the high tide at 8:06,” he said. In a beach town, people know the tides even when there’s no hurricane. He saw the locked car ignite, knocked a hole in the roof with a hammer, doused it with sea water and thought he had it under control when embers blew upward and underneath the shingles of the house next door. “We kept pulling off shingles, hoping to stop the embers, but the wind carried them too high and that was it.” Bill also lost his home.

I have been a reporter for 35 years and rarely have people I interviewed on the street during a disaster had the patience to tell me a story in such depth.

Next stop was the police commissioner, Michael Tangney. Mike coached my 24-year-old son Ben in coach-pitch baseball when Ben was 7.

I’d heard a radio report that there was looting but when I asked a police spokesman whom I didn’t know, he denied it. When I asked Mike, he hesitated and — maybe I’m imagining this — decided to trust me. He told me there had been one instance he knew of: Frank the barber had been robbed.

I don’t get my hair cut at Frank’s — I go to Nick at Majestic Barbers — but I go to Frank to get my watches fixed. (Frank Oliviero has many talents.) So I recognized him when he walked out of the police station after filing a report. “How you doing,” he said, giving me a smile.

Frank said he’d been robbed of $300, over 800 batteries and a new shipment of watch bands — and invited me to walk with him to the shop to have a look. Before we could go far, Carmen Concertino stopped the city bus he drives, which was empty, and insisted on giving us a ride.

Carmen lost a car and motorcycle in the flood. “I’ll drive you around town,” he said, “show you what’s going on.”

A private bus tour.

So, I got lots of inside stories.

But it cuts both ways. When you’re trusted, you don’t want to abuse that trust. Having lived in a community so long and feeling part of it and defensive about its shortcomings, I wasn’t as aggressive as I would have been in other places.

Because there had been no water or sewage service for days, FEMA brought in trailer trucks and handed out cases of water and food. I kept thinking how defeated I would feel if I had to take handouts. I couldn’t bring myself to interview the people and ask what it felt like.

I knew what it felt like. Lousy.

There had been TV crews all over town, but I didn’t feel excited. I felt they were gawking at us.

When I approached people, instead of saying, “Can I ask you a few questions,” I’d say, “Can I ask you a few questions or would you rather be left alone.”

“Thank you,” a man said before turning away.

I’ll tell you whom I did interview. John Duffy was struggling to take two cases of water home on his bike, when Louie Boyle stopped his pickup truck and offered him a ride.

It reminded me of my neighbor Kevin Peers, who left his door open for my family so we could make hot food on his gas stove while the electricity was out.

One of the places hardest hit by flooding was Lido Towers, a condominium. The first floor was submerged; sand washed up from the beach, burying cars. Local officials ordered everyone evacuated, including Linda Minerva, my 22-year-old son Sam’s kindergarten teacher.

I walked through the drifts to ask a man parked out front how badly the building was damaged. “We don’t know yet,” he said, tearing up. “Would you mind coming back in a few days?”

“I will,” I said, though I won’t.

Connect with Michael Winerip on Facebook.

Fuel Ships Start Arriving in New York Harbor

8:26 am Michael M. Grynbaum

Fuel Ships Start Arriving in New York Harbor

The gasoline shortage, which has emerged as one of the biggest difficulties faced by New Yorkers trying to resume normal routines, was caused in part by the closing of New York Harbor following the storm, Governor Cuomo said.

With the harbor reopened, the governor believes that the shortage will begin to ease. The governor has also waived a requirement that fuel tankers register and pay a tax before unloading their goods.

“I don’t like to waive the tax, I don’t want to lose the money, but we do want to accelerate the flow of gasoline,” Mr. Cuomo said.

On Thursday, ships began re-entering the harbor, including tankers and vessels carrying gasoline to terminals and distribution centers. “There should be a real change in position, and

Reeling From the Storm and Facing a New Danger: the Cold

Reeling From the Storm and Facing a New Danger: the Cold

By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Published: November 4, 2012

With tens of thousands of residents left homeless after the devastation from last week’s storm, New York-area officials began focusing on Sunday on another weather-related factor that might make the problems even worse: colder weather that is moving into the region.

In New York, 20,000 to 40,000 people, many of them residents of public housing, will have to find homes, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Sunday. Earlier in the day, Mr. Bloomberg compared it to the situation after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, but he later seemed to temper his assessment after news that power had been restored in some of the hardest hit areas.

Still, he said, at least 20,000 people live in homes that were so severely damaged by the storm surge that they were uninhabitable. Relocating those residents, he said, will be a daunting task.

“We don’t have a lot of empty housing in this city,” he said at a news conference “We are not going to let anybody go sleeping in the streets or go without blankets, but it’s a challenge, and we’re working on that as fast as we can.”

Thousands of people in New Jersey, on Long Island and in Connecticut face a similar problem. “This is going to be a massive, massive housing problem,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said at a news conference with the mayor.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Sunday that it would begin providing transitional housing to those who could not return to their homes. As of Sunday morning, 164,000 residents of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York had applied for aid, and the agency had approved more than $137 million in financial assistance.

Mr. Bloomberg called the cold the most pressing challenge in the recovery. The city has opened heating shelters and is passing out blankets to New Yorkers without electricity.

Temperatures throughout the region fell early Sunday into the 30s, and the National Weather Service issued a freeze watch for parts of New Jersey, including the coast, the scene of some of the worst damage. Officials have urged residents across the region to head to shelters.

“You can die from being cold,” Mr. Bloomberg said Sunday. “You can die from fires started from candles or stoves. Please go to the local disaster site. If you don’t know where to go, stop a cop on the side of the road and ask.”

Adding to the concerns, a northeaster could move in by midweek, forecasters said, hitting the already battered coastal areas with heavy winds and strong waves that could cause more flooding. Freezing temperatures are also expected.

Though the lights continued to flicker, including in some hard-hit regions like the Rockaways, Queens, on Sunday, more than 700,000 utility customers remained without power in New York State, including 404,000 on Long Island and 154,000 in New York City.

Nearly a million customers in New Jersey and 70,000 in Connecticut were also without power. But restoring electric service is only the first step. When the storm surge flooded homes along the coast, the ocean water destroyed boilers and water heaters.

Yet amid the despair, there has been an outpouring of good will. On Staten Island, in the Rockaways and in other regions pummeled by Hurricane Sandy, thousands of people, including runners who had expected to compete in the New York City Marathon, which was canceled late last week, have pitched in to haul away fallen trees and to distribute food and clothing.

The narrow streets of Midland Beach, one of the hardest hit areas on Staten Island, were alive with activity. Volunteers carried hoes, rakes, brooms and shovels as they went door to door offering their labor. Others circled the blocks in pickup trucks full of food, blankets, clothes and cleaning supplies. Impromptu distribution centers, piled high with food and secondhand clothes, sprung up on every other corner.

On Sunday morning, runners dressed in orange marathon gear crowded onto the Staten Island Ferry and headed to the storm-ravaged borough to help. They packed blankets, food, water and flashlights in shoulder bags. Some planned to run to battered areas once the ferry docked.

“There are people suffering on Staten Island, and we’ve got to do something about it,” said Neil Cohen, 42, from Riverdale in the Bronx.

Yet, it was not enough to solve some of the immense problems. Gas shortages persist, and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey has declared a fuel emergency and imposed rationing in 12 counties. On Sunday, gas lines seemed slightly shorter in some places than in the previous few days, but many stations were still closed. The authorities set up three fuel depots in New Jersey to provide doctors and nurses with up to 15 gallons apiece to allow them to get to work.

There were also concerns about drivers pumping more than their fair share of gasoline. Havier Nazario, 36, a principal at a Newark public school who was in line at a station outside Newark Airport, said he saw a man buy $101 worth of gas.

"I don’t know what he’s trying to power, but I think folks should pretty much just take what they need for their vehicle; otherwise the ration doesn’t have its effect,” he said.

Mr. Cuomo said that tankers and barges were on the way to ease shortages. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced that Port Elizabeth, N.J., reopened on Sunday to receive its first shipments. Other Port Authority seaports remained closed.

“We do believe it is a short-term problem,” Mr. Cuomo said, adding that shortages could continue for several days.

As for the subways, all of the numbered lines were running to some degree, said Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, who spoke with Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Bloomberg at a news conference, and the mayor said he would take the subway to work on Monday. The No. 1 train has been extended south to 14th Street, and transit officials said they hoped that it would reach Rector Street by Monday. (The South Ferry station, although the water has been pumped out, remains unusable.)

Mr. Lhota said trains would arrive at stations less often on Monday than on a normal weekday. “It’s an old system,” Mr. Lhota said in televised remarks. “It needs tender loving care, and it just had a major accident.”

The commute on Monday could be complicated by the return to school of nearly a million children. About 96 percent of the city’s school buses are expected to be operating, and all but 65 schools should be open, Mr. Bloomberg said. Students at closed schools will be sent to other locations, though the mayor said that keeping everyone informed about who goes where was proving difficult. The city has made over a million robocalls to parents and has purchased full page ads in Monday’s newspapers with information about scheduling changes.

Mr. Bloomberg also set the stage for possible confusion at polling places during the election on Tuesday. About 143,000 voters in the city will be assigned to polling sites outside their districts, and the mayor expressed hope that the New York Board of Elections, which he has criticized for mismanagement, would be prepared.

Asked whether he thought the Elections Board was up to the task, he replied: “I have absolutely no idea.”

Meanwhile, the cancellation of the New York City Marathon did not stop hundreds of runners from showing up at Central Park on Sunday morning, many of them celebrating as if the event had not been canceled.

Portable toilets, tents and even the finish line were still set up and provided runners a photo opportunity on what would have been Marathon Sunday.

Security guards asked people to clear a path for the hundreds of runners trotting by, many in orange shirts, waving their home countries’ flags and cheering each other on. Some asked for donations for the Red Cross as they jogged by. There was a barrage of languages and an assembly of athletes from grade school children to adults of all ages. Some cried at the finish line.

Greg Osborn, 62, of Melbourne, Australia, showed up in his custom-made white and green shirt bearing his name. His wife, Yvonne, cheered him on.

“It took a long time to get here,” she said. “Then we found out it was canceled. But standing out here with the sun and all these people? It’s beautiful.”

Feds p*ss away billions on Sandy disaster??

Source

Sandy’s next crisis: Thousands need housing

By Meghan Barr Associated Press Tue Nov 6, 2012 12:25 AM

Government leaders are turning their attention to the next crisis unfolding in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy: finding housing for potentially tens of thousands of people left homeless.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency said it has already dispensed close to $200 million in emergency housing assistance and has put 34,000 people in the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area up in hotels and motels.

But local, state and federal officials have yet to lay out a specific, comprehensive plan for finding them long-term places to live, even as cold weather sets in. And given the scarcity and high cost of housing in the metropolitan area and the lack of open space, it could prove a monumental undertaking.

For example, can enough vacant apartments be found? Will the task involve huge, Hurricane Katrina-style encampments of trailer homes? And if so, where will authorities put the trailers? In stadiums? Parks?

Authorities cannot answers those questions yet.

“It’s not going to be a simple task. It’s going to be one of the most complicated and long-term recovery efforts in U.S. history,” said Mark Merritt, president of Witt Associates, a Washington crisis management consulting firm founded by former FEMA director James Lee Witt.

Tactics that FEMA used in other disasters could be difficult to apply in the city. For example, Merritt said, it’s impossible to set up trailers in people’s driveways if everyone lives in an apartment building, and it’s harder to find space to set up mobile homes.

Sandy killed more 100 people in 10 states but vented the worst of its fury on New Jersey and New York. A week after the storm slammed the mid-Atlantic and the Northeast, 1.4 million homes and businesses remained in the dark.

Another storm — a nor’easter packing heavy rain and gusts of 50 to 60 mph — was headed for the metropolitan area Wednesday, threatening more flooding and power outages that could undo some of the repairs made in the past few days.

With the temperatures dropping into the 30s overnight, people in dark, unheated homes were urged to go to overnight shelters or daytime warming centers.

Because so many voters have been displaced by the storm, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order allowing people to vote in Tuesday’s statewide and presidential elections at any polling place in the state.

“Just because you are displaced doesn’t mean you are disenfranchised,” Cuomo said.

As for long-term housing for the homeless, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Monday that the government is looking into using everything from hotels and motels to FEMA trailers and prefab homes.

“Given the extent of need, no option is off the table,” she said. “All of them will have some place in this puzzle.”

Napolitano said the government’s first priority is getting people to a warm place where they can eat a hot meal. Beyond that, the government wants to find housing as close to people’s homes as possible.

“Whether we’ll be able to accomplish that, I couldn’t say,” she said. “We’re just now getting a handle on housing.”

Officials have yet to even establish the magnitude of the problem.

In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday that officials are going door-to-door in hard-hit areas to assess the need for shelter. He said the worst-case estimate is 40,000 people, half of them in public housing.

But he said as many as 20,000 will probably get their heat and power back within a few days. Ultimately, the number of people who need housing could be under 10,000, he said.

In New Jersey, state officials said they are still trying to figure out how many people will need long-term housing. At least 4,000 residents were in New Jersey shelters.

In the meantime, Bloomberg appointed Brad Gair, an emergency management specialist, as chief of housing recovery operations, with responsibility for overseeing the city’s efforts to find shelter for those left homeless by the storm.

The mayor asked for patience after reporters pressed Gair for more specifics on how he intended to deal with the problem, noting Gair had been on the job for only four hours.

“I want to assure everyone that every New Yorker who needs a warm place to live and a roof over his or her head is going to have one,” Bloomberg said.

In Staten Island, blue-jacketed FEMA volunteers knocked on doors in a devastated neighborhood, making sure everyone was registered to apply for aid.

Nor’easter threatens weather-weary East Coast

Nor’easter threatens weather-weary East Coast

Residents of a flood-wrecked home in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., offer encouragement to fellow victims of Sandy.

Associated Press

By Associated Press Mon Nov 5, 2012 2:33 PM

POINT PLEASANT BEACH, N.J. — A week after Superstorm Sandy pummeled the East Coast, wiping out entire communities, residents were bracing for yet another potentially damaging storm.

A nor’easter taking shape Monday in the Gulf of Mexico was expected to begin its march up the coast, eventually passing within 50 to 100 miles of the wounded New Jersey coastline on Wednesday. The storm was expected to bring winds of up to 55 mph, coastal flooding, up to 2 inches of rain along the shore, and several inches of snow to Pennsylvania and New York.

One of the biggest fears was that the storm could bring renewed flooding to parts of the shore where Sandy wiped out natural beach defenses and protective dunes.

“It’s going to impact areas many areas that were devastated by Sandy. It will not be good,” said Bruce Terry, the lead forecaster for the National Weather Service.

Some communities were considering again evacuating neighborhoods that were hit hard by Sandy and where residents had only recently been allowed to return. No town had made a final decision to do so as of mid-afternoon Monday.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg decided against a new round of evacuations.

“When Sandy was coming in, all the signs said that we were going to have a very dangerous, damaging storm, and I ordered a mandatory evacuation of low-lying areas, something that a lot of people don’t like to hear,” he said. “In this case, we don’t think that it merits that. It is a different kind of storm; the wind is coming from a different direction.”

In Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., Laura DiPasquale was frantically going through dozens of black plastic trash bags that volunteers had stuffed full of her household belongings and brought to the curb, trying to make sure nothing she intended to keep had gotten tossed out with debris like waterlogged drywall. Already, she had found treasured Christmas ornaments amid the detritus.

“I don’t know where anything is; I can’t even find my checkbook,” she said. “I have no idea what’s in any of these bags. And now another storm is coming and I feel enormous pressure. I don’t know if I can do this again. It is so overwhelming.”

People were advising DiPasquale to just let go of most of the stuff in the bags.

“I found an ornament that says ‘Baby’s First Christmas.’ People said, ‘Laura, you don’t need that,’” she said. “Yes, I do need that. I’ll wash it, or I’ll sanitize it, or I’ll boil it if I have to. Money means nothing to me. Sentimental stuff is everything.”

The new storm was expected to move up the coast Tuesday, past Georgia and South Carolina. By Wednesday morning, it was expected to be off Virginia or Cape Hatteras, N.C.

Terry said the storm could slow down somewhat once it gets off the New Jersey coast, meaning its effects could linger. They include rain, high winds and tidal surges, although less than those that accompanied Sandy.

Coastal flood and high wind watches were in effect for parts of Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

On Staten Island in New York City, Irina Vainauskas and her husband survived Sandy even as water reached the third step of the staircase from their living room to their second floor. They went upstairs with food, water and their cats.

They’re prepared to do it again, if necessary.

“Of course we’re concerned, but we’re just tired to be afraid and to think about everything,” she said in her ravaged living room.

“We’re survivors. We’re from the former Soviet Union,” she added. “If we survive the Soviet Union, we will survive this storm, too.”

Marilyn Skillender was picking through the pile of her belongings at the curb of her home about two blocks from the ocean in Point Pleasant Beach, worrying about the next storm. She instantly flashed back to a December 1992 nor’easter that pummeled the Jersey shore over two days with widespread flooding and property damage. Her house was inundated in that storm, too.

“Our defenses are down now,” she said. “As bad as last week was, if we get new damage, where are they gonna put all the new stuff that’s wrecked? If this debris starts floating around, how will we be able to move? All that sand they plowed away, if it comes back again, I don’t even want to think about it.”

Jim Mauro was one of the few professing not to be overly concerned about the impending nor’easter. A house he owned in Mantoloking was literally wiped off the map by Sandy last week. It wound up in Barnegat Bay.

“What more can it do?” he asked. “I mean, the house is literally gone, right down to the bare sand where it used to be.”

Two Lower Manhattans: Sandy spared some buildings, not others

Two Lower Manhattans: Sandy spared some buildings, not others

By Andrew Tangel

November 5, 2012, 5:26 p.m.

There seemed to be two Lower Manhattans on Monday. Some hard-hit businesses closed while crews drained and gutted their interiors, and others were up and running with little visible damage.

Some people in residential high-rises had power restored and never had to evacuate. Others -- even across the street from functional buildings -- were emptied of their inhabitants after flooding ruined electrical, heating and water systems.

Eugene Song, who lives in one residential building at on Water Street along Manhattan’s southeastern tip, said power came back early Monday morning. Heat and hot water have yet to return to his condo, but elevators work, so he and his family no longer have to climb 25 flights of stairs.

“The lights just came on -- we were sleeping -- which was a sweet surprise,” Song, 47, said. “Once we get the hot water back, we’re good.”

As Song waited for his two daughters to return from school -- the first day after a week off because of the storm -- frazzled residents lugged suitcases into an apartment building across Water Street. Flooding disabled their own building’s systems, prompting management to evacuate residents.

Francesco Ponti, 34, returned to fetch suits so he could dress for work Tuesday at an Italian commercial bank near Wall Street. He expressed frustration at what he said was a building manager’s suggestion that he should vacate while still paying rent for his $2,800-a-month studio and go to a public shelter (he’s instead staying with his girlfriend in Hoboken, N.J.).

“It’s really a mess,” Ponti said.

To be sure, Lower Manhattan was not as hard-hit as parts of Staten Island, Queens, Long Island or the Jersey Shore, where scores of residents lost their homes or even died in the storm.

Still, as Lower Manhattan dries out, Sandy has disrupted lives beyond what’s visible. At the same Water Street apartment high-rise where Ponti came to retrieve his belongings, Albert Tache, who works in security there, was coming to grips with a potentially sharp cut in income -- perhaps 75% -- while the building is closed.

“I’m feeling it in my income,” Tache, 50, said. “I’m shocked, because what am I going to do? I have to pay rent. I have to pay bills.”

The nearby South Street Seaport, an outdoor plaza of shops and restaurants with cobblestone streets along the East River, was empty. Stores were closed or boarded up.

At an Abercrombie & Fitch, strapping models were replaced by construction workers in white suits and blue hats yanking out wood and other detritus from the store’s interior, piling it in front.

Yet outside a shuttered Verizon store, a pickup truck towed up a mobile store, sort of a food cart for the latest mobile devices.

Wall Street giants also were coming back to life to varying degrees. The entrance to insurance giant American International Group, which reportedly suffered heavy flooding, was blocked off and employees were working elsewhere.

Across the island, on the southwestern tip of Manhattan, Goldman Sachs was up and running. The powerful investment was ringed with sandbags before Sandy and had power last week when offices reopened Wednesday. The bank even handed out water and allowed nearby residents to charge their phones. By Monday, a spokeswoman said the vast majority of its employees had returned to work at its downtown office tower.

For some businesses wrecked by Sandy, it may take weeks -- or longer -- to fully reopen.

The ritzy Delmonico’s steakhouse in the financial district hoped to reopen its first floor next week, and the basement by the holidays, said Allan Koval of Florida, who came to New York to oversee the building’s clean-up for a Maryland-based company.

Construction crews Monday were ripping out the restaurant’s newly renovated basement dining and party rooms, complete with leather walls and wood paneling.

“It was gorgeous,” Koval said. But now, “it’s all destroyed.”

andrew.tangel@latimes.com

Twitter:@AndrewTangel

Officials Rush to Find Ways for the Storm-Tossed to Vote

Officials Rush to Find Ways for the Storm-Tossed to Vote

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER, THOMAS KAPLAN and WENDY RUDERMAN

Published: November 5, 2012

Elected officials in New York and New Jersey scrambled Monday to enable displaced citizens to vote in the election on Tuesday, relocating scores of coastal polling places that had become unusable because of power failures, flooding or evacuations.

New Jersey and New York both said they would allow voters uprooted by Hurricane Sandy to cast provisional ballots anywhere in their states.

“Just because you’re displaced doesn’t mean you should be disenfranchised,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said in announcing the step on Monday.

But the provisional ballots would, in many cases, allow residents to vote only in statewide contests and in the presidential election, in which President Obama is heavily favored in both states. The ballots could not be used in local and Congressional races, which in some areas are far more competitive.

New Jersey went further, saying it will let displaced voters vote by fax or e-mail. Ballot-integrity advocates warned that this raised risks of fraud by hackers, or mischief by partisan local officials because electronic ballots lack secrecy and are not safeguarded by witnesses.

Across the storm-damaged region, bleary-eyed, disheveled residents drove long distances and waited in long lines at government offices to cast early ballots Monday, and many said voting felt like an important step back toward normalcy.

In New York, there are very tight Congressional or legislative races in Queens, on Staten Island, on Long Island and in Westchester County, all of which were hit hard by the storm. Candidates in those races went to great lengths to ensure that their supporters could surmount the extraordinary obstacles to voting this year.

On Staten Island, the Congressional campaign of Mark Murphy, a Democrat running against Representative Michael G. Grimm, a Republican, sent volunteers to gasoline lines across the borough with iPhones to help idling voters figure out where they should go on Tuesday. Mr. Grimm’s campaign said it was recruiting volunteers with full gas tanks to transport to the polls voters whose cars were destroyed or had no gas.

Many voters already confronted confusion and signs of chaos as they sought to vote Monday, or to figure out where they could vote on Tuesday.

“They told me I can register today, but I can’t vote in this election,” said Helen Colon, 69, a retired woman who journeyed to the Staten Island’s eastern shore to register her disabled husband to vote, after trying but failing to do so online. “At least that’s what I think they said.”

Local and state officials were plainly having trouble conveying information about Election Day obstacles and remedies. New Jersey officials could not say how many polling places had been moved — though they said fewer than 100 still needed “some resolution.” The outdated Web site for hard-hit Ocean County directed residents of Seaside Heights to that shore town’s flooded, unelectrified, empty community center.

In New York City, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg worried aloud that the relocation of polling places could depress turnout — since, he said, motivating people to cast their ballots was a chore even in an ordinary election year.

“The question is: Will they make the effort?” he said.

Polling places require power to run their electronic machines. As of Monday night, more than 100 polling places in New York State had been changed, including about 60 in the city. Most were in Brooklyn and Queens; in two cases, in the Rockaways and the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx, the city was setting up polling places in tents powered by generators and outfitted with portable heaters.

The city’s Board of Elections also arranged for shuttle buses that would run every 15 minutes to ferry voters to and from polling places in three areas hit particularly hard by the storm: the Rockaways, Coney Island and Staten Island.

Juan Carlos Polanco, a commissioner on the Board of Elections, said it had done everything in its power to publicize the new locations of polling places.

“We want New Yorkers to be patient tomorrow,” Mr. Polanco said. “Elections are hard enough to run as it is.”

But the board has a troubled track record, even when elections are not preceded by hurricanes. In 2010, computer malfunctions and delayed openings of polling places led Mr. Bloomberg to pronounce the board’s handling of the election a “royal screw-up.” In June, the five-way Democratic primary for Representative Charles B. Rangel’s seat took weeks to be counted.

Local elected officials were not optimistic about Tuesday. Councilwoman Gale A. Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, said she had heard from utility workers scheduled to work 12-hour shifts on Election Day who had no idea how they were supposed to vote. And Councilman Jumaane D. Williams, a Brooklyn Democrat, questioned why thousands of voters taking refuge at evacuation shelters would not be able to cast provisional ballots at their shelters.

Mr. Williams said, “My guess is if you don’t have your house, you have no place to live, you may not have food, this is probably not at the top of your list of things to do.”

In Ocean County, officials took extra steps to allow displaced residents to vote. They sent a mobile voting bus to shelters there and in adjacent Burlington County. They also sought to address the problem of provisional ballots by printing 50,000 generic ballots and allowing voters to fill in the names of their local candidates.

For candidates in tight races, the effort to get voters to the polls was both frantic and delicate.

On Long Island, volunteers for Randy Altschuler, the Republican challenging Representative Timothy H. Bishop, a Democrat, called voters to make sure they knew that the election was still taking place and to offer rides. But every conversation began with a question about whether the voters needed help.

“It’s really a totally different script,” said Diana Weir, Mr. Altschuler’s campaign manager.

Many barrier-island voters forced from their homes seemed to clutch at the chance to vote as if it were a memento salvaged from the flotsam of their pre-storm lives.

Justine Fricchione, 29, of Lavallette, N.J., voted at the county building in Toms River on Monday, she said, because without television, Internet or a charged cellphone, she had not been able to find out where to go on Election Day. She was forced to move because her home was severely damaged, and then again when her grandmother’s house lost power. But as the daughter of a onetime Jersey City councilman, she said, she was not going to be deterred.

“It’s your right to vote,” she said. “You figure out how to get there, and you just do it.”

New York Subway Repairs Border ‘on the Edge of Magic’

New York Subway Repairs Border ‘on the Edge of Magic’

By MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Published: November 8, 2012 153 Comments

Inside a sprawling Manhattan command center, a board that detects subway activity by sensor had gone quiet. No trains were running; the Metropolitan Transportation Authority had shut the system down as Hurricane Sandy approached.

Suddenly, the screens inexplicably crackled to life.

Something was moving down there. And it was not the trains.

To the subway’s chief maintenance officer, the storm’s encroaching waters were even more obvious. He was forced to flee with his flashlight from the South Ferry station in Lower Manhattan as the waters charged over the platform and up the terminal stairs, chasing him like an attack dog.

It has been less than two weeks since the most devastating storm in the New York City subway system’s 108-year history. Seven tunnels beneath the East River flooded. Entire platforms were submerged. Underground equipment, some of it decades old, was destroyed.

The damage was the worst that the system had ever seen. And yet, the subways have come back — quicker than almost anyone could have imagined.

Less than three days after the storm hit, partial subway service was restored. Most major lines were back within a week. Repairs came so quickly in some cases that the authority was ready before Consolidated Edison had restored power.

“Some of what they’re doing borders on the edge of magic,” said Gene Russianoff, the staff lawyer for the Straphangers Campaign, a rider advocacy group that is frequently critical of the authority.

Across the region’s transportation network, scars from Hurricane Sandy are still keenly visible. PATH service remains out between Hoboken and New York. New Jersey Transit’s Midtown Direct service is not running at all. At the Port Authority Bus Terminal, commuters endure chaos and winding lines that have lasted for hours.

But nearly everything under the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s auspices, from its commuter railroads to its bridges and tunnels, is running close to normal. Each restoration presented its own challenge, but none more daunting than the task of resurrecting the subways.

Interviews with those who oversaw the recovery suggest a rescue mission both thrilling and frightful, with officials at times alternating between a compulsion to cling to protocol and to toss it aside. Workers traversed darkened, slippery tunnels, inspecting sludgy tracks, equipment and third rails. Even the subway map itself was reimagined, as bright lines were faded to represent downed service.

None of this was truly expected in the days leading up to the storm.

In a morning radio interview on Oct. 25, the Thursday before the hurricane was projected to arrive, Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the transportation authority, recalled Tropical Storm Irene, which spurred an unprecedented systemwide shutdown last year.

“I don’t think we’re looking at anything like that,” he told WNYC.

By the afternoon, the tone had changed. During a 2 p.m. conference call with the governor’s office, Mr. Lhota recalled, state officials asked of the storm’s arrival: “What is zero hour?”

From there, officials worked backward. The authority’s storm plan included triggers for closing trains, bridges and tunnels, based on minimum thresholds of sustained winds. Waiting for these winds to arrive before acting was not an option.

“If we got everybody in on Monday morning,” Mr. Lhota said, “we couldn’t get them home.”

By Sunday morning, Mr. Lhota recalled, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo told him he had made a decision: the system would be taken offline at 7 p.m.

Thomas F. Prendergast, the president of New York City Transit, had already dispatched workers to cover vents and place sandbags at stations, and by Friday, the agency had begun coordinating with the Police Department and union leadership for the possibility of a shutdown. Barriers were placed at station entrances, including at South Ferry, near the tip of Lower Manhattan.

With a forecast for a storm surge of over 11 feet, Mr. Prendergast knew that flooding was possible. He predicted that three tunnels might have some flooding, which would equal the most in his career.

“I never anticipated seven,” he said. As the storm neared, pump trains were placed strategically at the center of the system, where crews could easily access them and approach the likely flood zones.

The dual tasks — shutting down the system and moving trains to safe ground — were often carried out simultaneously, Mr. Lhota said. Some trains continued taking passengers after 7 p.m. on Sunday, he said, but only if their route took them near their protected storage plot.

By early Monday, an eerie quiet had fallen over the agency. The subway was off, the trains were stored, but the storm had not yet arrived.

Around 8 p.m., after a local television appearance, Mr. Lhota decided to head downtown. But the West Side Highway was already submerged. Soon, he found, Greenwich Street was also impassable. He headed down Broadway, as far as he could.

Moments later, Mr. Lhota happened upon Mr. Prendergast, who had covered himself in a yellow jacket and a hard hat. Then the men in charge of trains and buses realized that another mode of travel might be required. “We’re talking about, ‘We’re going to need a bigger boat,’ ” Mr. Lhota recalled.

At the same time, Joseph Leader, the subway’s chief maintenance officer, went into South Ferry. No one knew the barriers outside the station had given way, Mr. Leader said, breached apparently by 15-foot hunks of wood that, late last week, remained strewed across the mezzanine, beside the turnstiles.

As he lurched into the terminal, the water had already risen over the platform. When it began climbing the stairs, Mr. Leader fled. He made his way on foot toward the darkened loop track, approaching Rector Street, training his flashlight ahead. “You could just see it rising, coming up the tracks,” he said. “I realized, I can’t stay here much longer.”

At the rail command center, the boards began to light up. “Everything just started to look like there was a train everywhere,” said Tom Calandrella, the senior director of rapid transit operations. “Once it gets wet, that same thing that conducts the train wheels, water, if it pulls up to a certain height, conducts everything.”

Mr. Lhota spent Monday night at a hotel in Midtown, near the authority’s headquarters on Madison Avenue. He got in around 3 a.m. and returned to the office hours later. In between, he found a deli open nearby. He ordered an omelet.

By late Monday night, teams had already been dispatched to inspect sections of the system, particularly those out of the surge’s path. Some work trains even ran during the storm, in areas removed from the surge, to check for water buildups, Mr. Leader said.

But restoration options were few, at least in the short term.

“It’s triage,” Mr. Lhota said.

Strategy turned on a simple question, Mr. Leader said, posed often in meetings with agency officials: “Well, what works?”

It seemed likely that buses could return quickly, as they soon would on a limited schedule, but the subways required painstaking decisions on how to deploy the agency’s resources.

“We had 7 under-river tunnels flooded out of 14,” Mr. Prendergast said. “And we have three pump trains. The first thing we have to do is, which tunnels do you go after first?”

The Joralemon Street tunnel was an obvious target, given the heavy ridership of the No. 4 and 5 trains and what appeared to be relatively little damage to the tube. It was dry almost immediately. Other tunnels, like the 14th Street tube that carries the L train or the Greenpoint tunnel for the G, had to wait.

Water in the L tunnel stretched 3,400 feet and was 15 feet deep. It was not dry until this week. For the Montague Street tunnel, which carries the R line, 4,000 feet of water, 10 feet deep, had still not been entirely pumped as of Thursday.

Publicly, the authority did not provide a timeline for service restoration. But Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg offered a guess at a news conference the day after the storm, estimating that service would not return for “a good four or five days.”

Mr. Lhota recalled seeing the announcement and wondering where the mayor was getting his information.

“It obviously wasn’t true, either,” Mr. Lhota said. “I have no idea who was briefing him.”

(A spokeswoman for the mayor said Mr. Lhota and Deputy Mayor Caswell F. Holloway corresponded frequently, but added that a briefing for the mayor before the news conference had focused on more immediate city concerns and included little about transportation.)

Nonetheless, the estimate may have succeeded in tempering public expectations for the system’s recovery. Mr. Lhota said the authority also made a point of publishing images from the tunnels, both to communicate progress and to relay the scope of the tasks, allowing riders to set expectations accordingly.

Beyond deploying the pump trains, which are diesel-powered, Mr. Calandrella said detritus on the tracks could affect draining.

And even if tunnels were pumped, obstacles remained. Workers had to inspect tracks, third rails and signals. There could be no dangerous debris in the tunnels. Some cables needed to be reattached.

Mr. Lhota said that despite the authority’s trove of ancient underground equipment, the authority’s warehouses in Queens and the Bronx were rarely without a required replacement part.

“Things break all the time,” he said. “We have inventory.”

Test trains began running partial routes on Wednesday. But with power still out in Lower Manhattan, no trains could run between Manhattan and Brooklyn. If not for the power loss, officials said, the No. 4 and 5 trains could have very likely returned during the week.

A so-called bus bridge — service to plug the gaps in the limited subway routes — emerged as the only option, Mr. Lhota said. Some officials worried about offering a below-average experience underground.

“There was a debate here about, ‘Do we bring them back if we can’t bring the countdown clocks?’ ” Mr. Lhota recalled, incredulously. “I was saying, ‘Yeah, we bring them back.’ ”

Charles Gordanier, the authority’s chief map designer, began drafting changes to the old subway map, fading out the lines that were without service. Copies were released to the public on Wednesday, and have since been updated as service is restored.

The bus bridges created winding lines and widespread gridlock, resulting from a simple math problem, Mr. Prendergast said: Between 1,500 and 2,000 people can pile into a train. A bus can fit no more than 75 or so.

Accordingly, connecting the boroughs by subway was the next priority. Late Friday, as the power returned, officials were confident they could restore full service to some trains, like the Lexington Avenue line and the No. 7, almost immediately. By Saturday morning, they had, and several other connections between boroughs followed.

After a news conference Saturday with Mr. Cuomo, Mr. Lhota held up a sheet of paper with a bar graph, depicting how much subway service had returned. By day’s end, it was expected to be 80 percent.

There were some hiccups. At West Fourth Street, unexpected third-rail and switch problems delayed the return of the D, F and M trains. As the authority prepared to bring the G train back this week, a transformer blew, keeping the train offline for the morning rush hour on Wednesday. There were still service gaps on the N train, the A train in Far Rockaway and the R line, among others.

On Thursday morning, inside his office, Mr. Lhota checked his BlackBerry often, hoping for an update on the L train. Moments later, he placed a call to Howard B. Glaser, Mr. Cuomo’s director of state operations, whom he wanted to brief on the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

The tunnel could open Friday, he told Mr. Glaser, remarking that Mr. Bloomberg, “like an idiot,” had predicted publicly that the tunnel might open over the weekend. “He’s making it up,” he said, after a brief hail of profanity in which Mr. Lhota wondered aloud who, exactly, Mr. Bloomberg had been talking to.

“It’s wrong,” he told Mr. Glaser. “It’s just wrong.”

Mr. Lhota also spoke of the L line’s importance, as if his audience needed convincing.

“You know who knows where the L train goes?” he barked into the phone. “All the hipsters in Williamsburg.”

The BlackBerry buzzed on the table in front of him. He grabbed it quickly, then put it back. No good news yet on the L, he said. Hours later, that would change. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he wrote on Twitter. “The L train is back. Enjoy your trip home tonight.”

What part of the Constitution allows the Feds to give handouts to disaster victims?

Source

Cuomo to Seek $30 Billion in Aid for Storm Relief

By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ

Published: November 12, 2012

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo plans to ask the federal government for at least $30 billion in disaster aid to help New York City and other affected areas of the state recover from the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, according to top administration officials.

In making the case for federal aid, the governor’s advisers provided a staggering inventory of need as the city and state continued to rebuild in the storm’s deadly wake: $3.5 billion to repair the region’s bridges, tunnels and subway and commuter rail lines; $1.65 billion to rebuild homes and apartment buildings; $1 billion to reimburse local governments for overtime costs of police, fire and other emergency personnel; and several billion dollars in federal loans and grants to affected businesses.

In all, Hurricane Sandy caused more than $50 billion in damage in the New York region, according to Cuomo administration officials, making it the country’s costliest storm other than Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast region in 2005. That hurricane caused about $145 billion in damages, with the federal government providing about $110 billion in disaster aid, according to Cuomo officials.

In outlining the plan, Cuomo officials provided an assessment of the economic toll of the storm in New York. Businesses throughout the city and state lost $13 billion after being forced to close for days either because of damage to their property or because employees could not get to their jobs with travel restrictions widely in place, according to Cuomo aides.

The governor’s move comes as President Obama is scheduled to appear on Thursday in the New York City area, where he is expected to view the recovery efforts and announce a rebuilding program for the region. On Sunday, the Homeland Security secretary, Janet Napolitano, toured Staten Island to view the response there.

It is clear that the effects of the storm are still being acutely felt. More than 125,000 customers were still without power on Sunday, including about 110,000 customers served by the Long Island Power Authority. Many gas stations remained closed, but the city’s introduction of odd-even gas rationing seemed to have shortened lines.

The storm-related death toll in New York City officially rose to 43, as a man who fell during the storm in his home in Queens succumbed to his injuries on Saturday. And transportation officials made more progress on shuttered lines and crossings. The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel will reopen only for bus traffic on Monday, and more service will be restored on the Long Island Rail Road and PATH.

Mr. Cuomo’s request could be seen as a challenge to Mr. Obama to make good on his pledge, delivered during a high-profile visit to New Jersey, to provide federal support for the recovery effort. But it also could be seen as a test of the governor’s ability to extract billions of dollars of aid from Washington at a difficult time, with White House officials and Congressional leaders searching to find areas of government to cut to avert a Jan. 1 fiscal crisis.

It is far from certain whether Mr. Cuomo will get what he is looking for despite the president’s reassurances. The amount the governor is apparently seeking would exceed the roughly $12 billion in FEMA disaster aid currently available in Washington without action from Congress, where there is likely to be strong opposition to more spending.

Mr. Cuomo’s plan, which is still being drafted by his aides, rests in part on persuading the federal government to make an emergency appropriation in the coming weeks during a lame-duck session of Congress that begins on Tuesday.

New York will not be alone in seeking disaster relief from Washington. Members of Congress in both major parties from other storm-ravaged states — including New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia — will almost certainly be seeking federal assistance for their constituents.

Mr. Cuomo intends to use the money from Washington for far-reaching improvements to the critical but decaying infrastructure of the city and the state.

For example, he is looking at a proposal to replace the region’s power grid with a so-called smart grid that would improve the ability of utility companies to pinpoint areas with power failures and respond to them. That proposal could cost at least $30 billion over 10 years, according to senior aides to the governor.

In addition, Mr. Cuomo is looking at a plan to have the federal government invest billions of dollars to modernize the fuel supply capacity of the New York City region to avoid the kind of gas shortages that have plagued New Yorkers since the storm barreled through.

The plan would include building new oil and gas pipelines from the New England states to reduce New York’s dependence on fuel that arrives through ports in New Jersey, a state that was also hobbled by the storm and was thus unable to continue to fully supply the region with fuel.

Mr. Cuomo is also considering the creation of an emergency petroleum reserve for the state, much like the one the federal government has at its disposal in the event of a national crisis.

Over the weekend, gas lines appeared to ease in New York and New Jersey. On Sunday morning in Manhattan, all the pumps at a BP station at Houston and Crosby Streets were serving taxis. About five cars were waiting in line.

In Brooklyn, there was a line at a Hess station at Fourth Avenue and Union Street. About 60 cars stretched for several blocks down Union. At another Hess station at Fourth Avenue and 30th Street, there were about 30 cars in a line stretching three blocks.

In the Rockaways, a Long Island Power Authority official told a skeptical but orderly crowd of about 300 people on Sunday that the utility was already beginning to restore power along the peninsula east of Breezy Point. But for power to be switched on, each building must receive certification from a licensed electrician that the building is ready for electricity, said the official, Nick Lizanich, vice president for operations.

“As soon as we receive confirmation that your house can be restored, we will restore it within a very short period of time,” Mr. Lizanich said.

His comment drew an immediate response from a woman in the crowd. “Your nose is glowing,” she said.

Reporting was contributed by Charles V. Bagli, Diane Cardwell, Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Christopher Maag.

U.S. Asks New York Landlords for Vacant Apartments to House Displaced Families

U.S. Asks New York Landlords for Vacant Apartments to House Displaced Families

By CHARLES V. BAGLI

Published: November 11, 2012

City, state and federal officials are trying to assemble a pool of vacant apartments in New York City that could supplement the city’s shelter system in housing hundreds if not thousands of families displaced by storm damage and power outages.

Although many people have clung to their homes despite having neither heat nor hot water, particularly in city housing projects in Coney Island and the Rockaways, officials are worried that another wave of people will seek shelter as temperatures fall and they can no longer bear the cold.

“There’s a huge fear that folks are going to be displaced for the medium and long term,” said Mathew M. Wambua, the city’s housing commissioner. “We feel a real imperative to have something in place when the second surge comes.”

Officials have discussed a variety of ways to accelerate rebuilding, including using modular housing. But meetings in New York last week involving city and state officials focused on creating a clearinghouse that would match displaced families with vacant apartments.

At a meeting in Manhattan on Wednesday evening, Shaun Donovan, the federal Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, told real estate executives, “You really need to help out,” according to one executive who was present. The meeting, real estate executives said, was one element of a White House rebuilding program that President Obama is expected to announce on Thursday in Manhattan for New York, New Jersey and possibly Connecticut.

Developers and landlords expressed a willingness to pitch in, but they also raised some issues that needed to be addressed first. That led to lengthy meetings on Thursday between state and city officials and members of the Real Estate Board of New York, the Rent Stabilization Association and the state Association for Affordable Housing.

They discussed creating a system by which people who apply to the Federal Emergency Management Agency for housing could be matched with landlords who have vacant apartments. The tenants would pay rent directly with a FEMA voucher, or obtain an apartment through an agency like the Red Cross.

In the New York area, FEMA provides about $1,800 a month in rental assistance for up to 18 months. [Why do people who can afford a $1,800 a month rent payment need government assistance??? In Phoenix you can rent a nice 3 bedroom home for $800 a month] That would cover most housing in Brooklyn and Queens, but developers said it would fall short of covering many units in Manhattan. The need for temporary housing remains, even in Manhattan, where the heating and electrical systems in complexes like Knickerbocker Village on the Lower East Side were swamped with seawater. Electricity was restored to most apartments in that complex until an electrical fire cut power again.

Landlords raised a series of statutory and legal hurdles that would have to be overcome. In apartments that operate under the state’s rent stabilization laws, there is no provision for short-term tenants. [As usual, government is the cause of the problem, not the solution to the problem] Some building owners asked whether the government would indemnify them for apartment damages or legal costs if they were forced to evict a tenant.

“People want to do the right thing,” said Charles Dorego, senior vice president of Glenwood Management, a major Manhattan landlord, who attended the meetings on behalf of the Real Estate Board. “But they don’t want to inherit a pig in a poke. They asked for indemnity, although I don’t see how a government agency can do that.”

By Friday afternoon, officials had developed a proposal that they were beginning to circulate within the real estate industry and hope to unveil soon.

A spokesman for Mr. Donovan said they were on a fast track to devise a creative solution to the housing disaster, but they were not ready to announce any specifics. [Translation they want to temporally undo the damage their silly laws have cause]

It is unclear how many apartments might be included in the pool, given that the city’s vacancy rate is in the low single digits. Some landlords in Brooklyn and Queens called the Rent Stabilization Association on Monday offering apartments for families forced out of their homes. But by Thursday, they said many of those units were now occupied.

Richard LeFrak, whose family owns more than 10,000 apartments in New York and New Jersey, said he had no vacant units, after moving nearly 150 families from their damaged first-floor apartments. His buildings suffered “tens of millions of dollars in damage from the storm,” especially in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, and Jersey City. “We’re so tight now,” Mr. LeFrak said.