President Obama has declared a 'major disaster' in New York and Long
Island as swathes of the city woke up under water after a night of being
battered by Superstorm Sandy. This morning millions of people on the East Coast
are facing flooded homes, fallen trees and widespread power outages caused by
the giant storm, which swamped New York City's subway system and submerged
streets in Manhattan's financial district.
Battle: More than 190 firefighters have contained the six-alarm blaze fire in the Breezy Point section, but they are still putting out some pockets of fire
Sandy, one of the biggest storms to ever descend on the country, hit the
mainland at 6.30pm local time yesterday having laid waste to large parts of the
coast during the day. The storm that
made landfall in New Jersey yesterday evening with 80 mph sustained winds
killed at least 17 people in seven states, cut power to more than 7.4 million
homes and businesses from the Carolinas to Ohio, caused scares at two nuclear
power plants and stopped the presidential campaign cold.
Destruction: Cars floating after being pushed out a flooded basement in the city during last night's battering
Beached: A huge tanker washed up on shore in Staten Island after the superstorm hit the east coast
Road blocked: Pieces of lumber displaced from a yard by rising flood waters are seen beneath Manhattan Bridge in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy
Transport down: A view of an entirely flooded tunnel under Battery Park. New York was among the hardest hit, with its financial heart in Lower Manhattan shuttered for a second day and seawater cascading into the still-gaping construction pit at the World Trade Center
New York was among the hardest hit, with its financial heart in Lower
Manhattan shuttered for a second day and seawater cascading into the
still-gaping construction pit at the World Trade Center. Among the dead in New
York were two children killed instantly by a falling tree in Westchester
County, a woman electrocuted to death by falling wires in Manhattan and a
29-year-old man killed in a car crash in Queens. A 30-year-old man was also
killed when a tree fell on his house in Flushing, Queens.
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Emergency: President Barack Obama has declared a 'major disaster' in New York and Long Island. Pictured, he receives an update on the ongoing response to Hurricane Sandy, in the Situation Room of the White House, Participating via teleconference
The massive storm reached well into the Midwest: Chicago officials warned
residents to stay away from the Lake Michigan shore as the city prepares for
winds of up to 60 mph and waves exceeding 24 feet well into Wednesday. 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.
SANDY KILLS AT LEAST 17 PEOPLE
At least 17 people have died in the devastation wreaked by Superstorm Sandy - including two children killed instantly by a falling tree.
The children - named locally as Jack Baumler, 11, and Michael Robson, 13 - were crushed by the toppled tree as they played outside their home in Westchester County, New York state, at 6.45pm on Monday.
Other fatalities include a woman who was electrocuted to death by falling wires on Manhattan’s 134th Street and a 29-year-old man who was killed in a car crash in Queens.
A man was crushed by a falling tree in Ulster County, New York State, and one death has been reported in Connecticut and two people were killed when their pick-up was crushed by a falling tree in New Jersey.
Police in Toronto said a woman was killed by a falling sign as high winds closed in on Canada's largest city.
A 30-year-old man was killed when a tree fell on his house on 166th Street in Flushing, New York City.
Meanwhile a 62-year-old man was killed as he let his dog out on his porch in Oley, Pennsylvania.
An eight-year-old boy died when he was crushed by a falling tree in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania.
And a jogger was reportedly hospitalised after being crushed by a falling tree in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park.
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.
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Skyscrapers swayed and creaked in winds that partially toppled a crane 74
stories above Midtown. Right before dawn, a handful of taxis were out on the
streets, though there was an abundance of emergency and police vehicles. Remnants
of the former Category 1 hurricane were forecast to head across Pennsylvania
before taking another sharp turn into western New York by Wednesday morning.
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. 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 wind - and even snow in West Virginia and other mountainous areas
inland.
Just before it made landfall at 8 p.m. near Atlantic City, N.J.,
forecasters stripped Sandy 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. 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 16 deaths on the converging storms - five in
New York, three each in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, two in Connecticut, and
one each in Maryland, North Carolina and West Virginia. Three of the victims
were children, one just 8 years old. Sandy, which killed 69 people in the
Caribbean before making its way up the Eastern Seaboard, began to hook left at
midday Monday toward the New Jersey coast. Even before it made landfall,
crashing waves had claimed an old, 50-foot 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. Sitting on the dangerous northeast
wall of the storm, the New York metropolitan area got the worst of it.
An explosion at a ConEdison substation knocked out power to about 310,000
customers in Manhattan, said Miksad. 'We see a pop. The whole sky lights up,'
said Dani Hart, 30, who was watching the storm from the roof of her building in
the Navy Yards. 'It sounded like the Fourth of July,' Stephen Weisbrot said
from his 10th-floor apartment. 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 neonatal intensive
care that were on battery-powered respirators - had to be carried down
staircases and to dozens of waiting ambulances. Not only was the subway shut
down, but the Holland Tunnel connecting New York to New Jersey was closed, as
was a tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Brooklyn Bridge, the George
Washington Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and several other spans were
closed due to high winds. The three major airports in the New York area -
LaGuardia, Newark Liberty and Kennedy - remained shut down Tuesday. A
construction crane atop a $1.5 billion luxury high-rise in midtown Manhattan
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.'
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 an 1888 blizzard struck the city. Fire destroyed at least 50
homes Monday night in a flooded neighborhood in the Breezy Point section of the
borough of Queens, where the Rockaway peninsula juts into the Atlantic Ocean.
Firefighters told WABC-TV that they had to use a boat to rescue residents
because the water was chest high on the street. About 25 people were trapped in
one home, with two injuries reported.
Airlines canceled around 12,500 flights because of the storm, a number
that was expected to grow. 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 Marlon Brando 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 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.
One of the units at Indian Point, a nuclear power plant about 45 miles
north of New York City, was shut down around 10:45 p.m. Monday 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 officials
declared an 'unusual event' at the Oyster Creek nuclear power plant in Lacey
Township, N.J., the nation's oldest, when waters surged to 6 feet above sea
level during the evening.
Within two hours, the situation at the reactor - which was offline for
regular maintenance - was upgraded to an alert, the second-lowest in a
four-tiered warning system. Oyster Creek provides 9 percent of the state's
electricity. In Baltimore, fire officials said four unoccupied rowhouses
collapsed in the storm, sending debris into the street but causing no injuries.
Meanwhile, a blizzard in far western Maryland caused a pileup of
tractor-trailers that blocked the westbound lanes of Interstate 68 on slippery
Big Savage Mountain near the town of Finzel. 'It's like a long-tailed cat in a
room full of rocking chairs up here,' said Bill Wiltson, a Maryland State
Police dispatcher.
Hundreds of miles from the storm's center, gusts topping 60 mph prompted
officials to close the port of Portland, Maine, and scaring away several cruise
ships. A state of emergency in New
Hampshire prompted Vice President Joe Biden to cancel a rally in Keene and
Republican nominee Mitt Romney's wife, Ann, to call off her bus tour through
the Granite State.
About 360,000 people in 30 Connecticut towns were urged to leave their
homes under mandatory and voluntary evacuation orders. Christi McEldowney was
among those who fled to a Fairfield shelter. She and other families brought
tents for their children to play in. 'There's something about this storm,' she
said. 'I feel it deep inside.'
Despite dire warnings and evacuation orders that began Saturday, many
stayed put. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie - whose own family had to move to
the executive mansion after his home in Mendham, far from the storm's center,
lost power - criticized the mayor of Atlantic City for opening shelters there
instead of forcing people out. Eugenia Buono, 77, and her neighbor, Elaine
DiCandio, 76, were among several dozen people who took shelter at South
Kingstown High School in Narragansett, R.I. They live on Harbor Island, which
is connected to the mainland by a causeway. 'I'm not an idiot,' said Buono, who
survived hurricanes Carol in 1954 and Bob in 1991. 'People are very foolish if
they don't leave.'
Today stock trading will be closed in the U.S. again for a second day
running - the last time the New York Stock Exchange was closed for weather was
in 1985 because of Hurricane Gloria, and it will be the first time since 1888
that the exchange will have been closed for two consecutive days because of
weather. Residents in New York City
spent much of yesterday trying to salvage normal routines, jogging and snapping
pictures of the water while officials warned the worst of the storm had not
hit. Water lapped over the seawall in Battery Park City, flooding rail yards,
subway tracks, tunnels and roads.
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