Superstorm Sandy slammed into the New Jersey coastline with 80 mph winds
Monday night and hurled an unprecedented 13-foot surge of seawater at New York
City, flooding its tunnels, subway stations and the electrical system that
powers Wall Street. At least 16 U.S. deaths were blamed on the storm, which
brought the presidential campaign to a halt a week before Election
Day. Sandy also killed 66 people in the Caribbean. For New York City at
least, Sandy was not the days-long onslaught many had feared, and the wind and
rain that sent water sloshing into Manhattan from three sides began dying down
within hours.
Still, the power was out for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and an
estimated 7.5 million people altogether across the East. The full extent of the
storm's damage across the region was unclear, and unlikely to be known until
daybreak. Stock trading will be closed in the U.S. for a second day Tuesday —
the first time the New York Stock Exchange will be closed for two consecutive
days due to weather since 1888, when a blizzard struck the city.
Heavy rain and further flooding remain major threats for the next couple
of days as the storm makes its way into Pennsylvania and up into New York
State. The center of the storm was just outside Philadelphia near midnight, and
its winds were down to 75 mph, just barely hurricane strength. "It was
nerve-racking for a while, before the storm hit. Everything was rattling,"
said Don Schweikert, who owns a bed-and-breakfast in Cape May, N.J., near where
Sandy roared ashore. "I don't see anything wrong, but I won't see
everything until morning."
As the storm closed in, it converged with a cold-weather system that
turned it into a superstorm, a monstrous hybrid consisting not only of rain and
high wind but snow in West Virginia and other mountainous areas inland. It
smacked the boarded-up big cities of the Northeast corridor — Washington,
Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston — with stinging rain and gusts of
more than 85 mph. Just before Sandy reached land, forecasters stripped it of
hurricane status, but the distinction was purely technical, based on its shape
and internal temperature. It still packed hurricane-force wind, and forecasters
were careful to say it was still dangerous to the tens of millions in its path.
Sandy made landfall at 8 p.m. near Atlantic City, which was already
mostly under water and saw a 50-foot piece of its world-famous Boardwalk washed
away earlier in the day. Authorities reported a record surge 13 feet high at
the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan, from the storm and high tide
combined. In an attempt to lessen damage from saltwater to the subway system
and the electrical network beneath the city's financial district, New York
City's main utility cut power to about 6,500 customers in lower Manhattan. But
a far wider swath of the city was hit with blackouts caused by flooding and
transformer explosions.
About 670,000 customers were without power late Monday in the city and
suburban Westchester County. "This will be one for the record books,"
said John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at ConEdison.
"This will be the largest storm-related outage in our history." New
York's transit agency said water surged into two major commuter tunnels, the
Queens Midtown and the Brooklyn-Battery, and it cut power to some subway
tunnels in lower Manhattan after water flowed into the stations and onto the
tracks. "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."
More than 200 patients — including 20 infants from neonatal intensive
care — were moved from New York University's Tisch Hospital after its power
went out and a backup generator failed. The patients, some on respirators
operating on battery power, were taken to other hospitals. A construction crane
atop a luxury high-rise collapsed in the high winds and dangled precariously 74
floors above the street. Forecasters said the wind at the top the building may
have been close to 95 mph. The facade of a four-story building in Manhattan's
Chelsea neighborhood crumbled and collapsed, leaving the lights, couches,
cabinets and desks inside visible from the street. No one was hurt.
As the storm approached the Northeast over the weekend, airlines
canceled more than 12,000 flights in the region. Storm damage was projected at
$10 billion to $20 billion, meaning it could prove to be one of the costliest
natural disasters in U.S. history. Sixteen deaths were reported in New Jersey,
New York, Maryland, North Carolina, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and
Connecticut. Some of the victims were killed by falling trees. At least one
death was blamed on the storm in Canada.
President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney canceled
their campaign appearances at the very height of the race, with just over a
week to go before Election Day. The president pledged the government's help and
made a direct plea from the White House to those in the storm's path. "When
they tell you to evacuate, you need to evacuate," he said. "Don't
delay, don't pause, don't question the instructions that are being given,
because this is a powerful storm."
Sandy, which killed 69 people in the Caribbean before making its way up
the Atlantic, began to hook left at midday toward the New Jersey coast. 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. And the New York metropolitan area apparently got the worst
of it, because it was on the dangerous northeastern wall of the storm. "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 energy of the storm surge is off the charts,
basically."
Hours before landfall, there was graphic evidence of the storm's power. Off
North Carolina, a replica of the 18th-century sailing ship HMS Bounty that was
built for the 1962 Marlon Brando movie "Mutiny on the Bounty" went
down in the storm, and 14 crew members were rescued by helicopter from rubber
lifeboats bobbing in 18-foot seas. Another crew member was found hours
afterward but was later pronounced dead at a hospital. The captain remains
missing.
At Cape May, water sloshed over the seawall, and it punched through
dunes in other seaside communities. "When I think about how much water is
already in the streets, and how much more is going to come with high tide
tonight, this is going to be devastating," said Bob McDevitt, president of
the main Atlantic City casino workers union. "I think this is going to be
a really bad situation tonight." In Maryland, at least 100 feet of a
fishing pier at the beach resort of Ocean City was destroyed. At least half a
million people along the East Coast had been ordered to evacuate, including
375,000 from low-lying parts of New York City.
Nuclear plant shuts down, nation's oldest plant on alert
Part of a nuclear power plant was shut down late Monday while another
plant — the nation's oldest — was put on alert after waters from superstorm
Sandy rose 6 feet above sea level.
One of the units at Indian Point, a plant about 45 miles north of New
York City, was shut down around 10:45 p.m. because of external electrical grid
issues said Entergy Corp., which operates the plant. The company said there was
no risk to employees or the public, and the plant was not at risk due to water
levels from the Hudson River, which reached 9 feet 8 inches and was subsiding.
Another unit at the plant was still operating at full power.
The oldest U.S. nuclear power plant, New Jersey's Oyster Creek, was
already out of service for scheduled refueling. But high water levels at the
facility, which sits along Barnegat Bay, prompted safety officials to declare
an "unusual event" around 7 p.m. About two hours later, the situation
was upgraded to an "alert," the second-lowest in a four-tiered
warning system. Conditions were still safe at Oyster Creek, Indian Point and
all other U.S. nuclear plants, said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which
oversees plant safety.
A rising tide, the direction of the wind and the storm's surge combined
to raise water levels in Oyster Creek's intake structure, the NRC said. The
agency said that water levels are expected to recede within hours and that the
plant, which went online in 1969 and is set to close in 2019, is watertight and
capable of withstanding hurricane-force winds. The plant's owner, Exelon Corp.,
said power was also disrupted in the station's switchyard, but backup diesel
generators were providing stable power, with more than two weeks of fuel on
hand. In other parts of the East Coast, nuclear plants were weathering the
storm without incident.
Inspectors from the NRC, whose own headquarters and Northeast regional
office were closed for the storm, were manning all plants around the clock. The
agency dispatched extra inspectors or placed them on standby in five states,
equipped with satellite phones to ensure uninterrupted contact. Nuclear power
plants are built to withstand hurricanes, airplane collisions and other major
disasters, but safety procedures call for plants to be shut down when
hurricane-force winds are present, or if water levels nearby exceed certain
flood limits.
At the Salem and Hope Creek plants in Hancocks Bridge, N.J., which
together produce enough power for about 3 million homes per day, officials were
watching for sustained winds of 74 mph or greater that would trigger taking the
plants offline. The nearby Delaware River posed another hazard if water levels
exceed 99.5 feet, compared with a normal level of 89 feet. Joe Delmar, a
spokesman for Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., said that only essential
employees had been asked to report to work but that current projections were
that the plants would not have to close. One of the units at Salem had already
been offline due to regular refueling and maintenance.
In Lusby, Md., the Calvert Cliffs Nuclear Power Plant was operating at
full power — enough to power more than 1 million homes. Additional staff, both
onsite and off, were called in to prepare for the storm. Safety officials there
will take the plant offline if sustained winds exceed 75 mph or water levels
rise more than 10 feet above normal sea level. At Pennsylvania's Susquehanna
plant in Salem Township, officials were ready to activate their emergency plan,
a precursor to taking the plant offline, if sustained winds hit 80 mph. "Our
top concern is ensuring that the plants are in a safe condition, that they are
following their severe weather procedures," said Diane Screnci of the
Nuclear Regulatory Commission. She said that even though the agency's
headquarters and regional office had been closed, its incident response center
was staffed, with other regions ready to lend a hand if necessary.
At the Millstone nuclear power complex on Connecticut's shoreline,
officials said earlier Monday they were powering down one of the two reactors
to 75 percent of maximum output to maintain stability of the electric grid.
Millstone spokesman Ken Holt said the grid's stability could be affected if the
unit was operating at 100 percent and suddenly went offline, which isn't
expected to happen. Some 60 million people in 13 states plus the District of
Columbia get their power from PJM, the largest regional power grid in the U.S.
Contingency plans call for power to be brought in from other areas to replace
power lost if a nuclear plant reduces output or goes offline. "It's done
instantaneously," said Paula DuPont-Kidd, a spokeswoman for the grid.
"Even if multiple plants go offline at the same time, we'd have to see how
adjustments would be made, but for the most part we plan for that
scenario."
In August 2011, multiple nuclear plants shut down due to Hurricane
Irene, with others reducing power. Although nuclear plants are built for resilience,
their operations get more complicated when only emergency personnel are on duty
or if external electricity gets knocked out, as often happens during
hurricanes. "When external power is not available, you have to use standby
generators," said Sudarshan Loyalka, who teaches nuclear engineering at
University of Missouri. "You just don't want to rely on backup
power."
Chicago Tribune
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