Sandy starts piling on NYC

10 killed in its path; 5.2 million in dark

An elderly man is rescued Monday by volunteer firemen in West Atlantic City, N.J. Hurricane Sandy forced the shutdown of mass transit, schools and financial markets, sending coastal residents fleeing, and threatening a mix of high winds and soaking rain.
An elderly man is rescued Monday by volunteer firemen in West Atlantic City, N.J. Hurricane Sandy forced the shutdown of mass transit, schools and financial markets, sending coastal residents fleeing, and threatening a mix of high winds and soaking rain.

— Downgraded from hurricane status, 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, threatening its subways and the electrical system that powers Wall Street. At least 10 U.S. deaths were blamed on the storm, which brought the presidential campaign to a halt a week before Election Day.

Sandy knocked out power to at least 5.2 million people across the East, and New York City’s main utility said large sections of Manhattan were plunged into darkness. Water pressed into the island from three sides.

Just before it blew ashore in the evening, the National Hurricane Center announced that it considered Sandy no longer a hurricane but a wintry hybrid known as a post tropical storm.

The decision was technical and based on the storm’s shape and its mix of cold and warm temperatures - a distinction that meant more to meteorologists than the 50 million people still in its path. The storm’s top sustained winds weakened only slightly, to 85 mph from 90.

photo

AP

Terry Robinson wades through water after gathering some of his belongings from his flooded trailer in Kitty Hawk, N.C., on Monday.

As it closed in, Sandy knocked out electricity to more than 5.2 million people and is likely to affect tens of millions more. It smacked the boarded-up big cities of the Northeast corridor, from Washington and Baltimore to Philadelphia, New York and Boston, with stinging rain and gusts of more than 85 mph. It also converged with a cold-weather system that turned it into a superstorm of rain, high wind and snow.

Sandy made landfall at 8 p.m. near Atlantic City, which was already mostly under water and saw a piece of its world-famous Boardwalk washed away earlier in the day. Forecasters warned of 20-foot waves bashing into the Chicago lakefront and up to 3 feet of snow in West Virginia.




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Ten deaths were reported in New Jersey, New York, 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. One person died in a storm-related traffic accident in Maryland, and a Pennsylvania man fell from a tree while trimming branches in preparation for the hurricane.

Airlines canceled more than 12,000 flights, and 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.

Subways were shut down from Boston to Washington, as were Amtrak and the commuter rail lines.

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.

Sandy, which killed 69 people in the Caribbean before making its way up the Atlantic, began to hook left at midday and was about 40 miles south of Atlantic City by evening, moving west northwest at almost 30 mph - faster than forecasters expected.

The storm lost its status as hurricane because it no longer had a warm core nor the convection - the upward air movement in the eye - that traditional hurricanes have, but it was still as dangerous as it was when it was considered a hurricane, according to hurricane center spokesman Dennis Feltgen.

It tipped into the post tropical category because it has become “devoid of thunderstorms near the center,” said Ed Rappaport, deputy director of the National Hurricane Center.

That should mean a storm that is larger in physical dimensions affecting more people, but with weaker peak winds, meteorologists say.

Authorities in New York City reported a record storm surge 13 feet high at the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan, from the storm and high tide combined.

“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.”

In New York City, authorities worried that saltwater would seep through the boarded-up street grates and through the sandbags placed at subway entrances, crippling the electrical connections needed to operate the subway. Even the Erie Canal was shut down.

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.

Another 1 million customers lost power earlier Monday in New York City, the northern suburbs and coastal Long Island, where flood waters swamped cars, downed trees and put neighborhoods under water.

“The worst of it is about to hit,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said early Monday evening.

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.

On coastal Long Island, flood waters swamped cars, downed trees and put neighborhoods under water as beach fronts and fishing villages bore the brunt of the storm. A police car was lost rescuing 14 people from the popular resort Fire Island.

Cars floated along the streets of Long Beach and flooding consumed several blocks south of the bay, residents said.

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.

“You have to stay wherever you are. Let me repeat that. You have to stay wherever you are,” Bloomberg said at a later news conference.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, holding his own news conference on Long Island where the lights flickered and his mike went in and out, said most of the National Guard troops deployed to the New York City area would go to Long Island.

Hours before landfall, there was graphic evidence of the storm’s power.

A construction crane atop a luxury high-rise in New York City collapsed in the wind and dangled precariously 74 floors above the street. Forecasters said the wind at the top the building may have been close to 95 mph.

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 later but was unresponsive. The captain was missing.

At Cape May, water sloshed over the seawall, and it punched through dunes in other seaside communities. Sandy also tore away an old section of Atlantic City’s historic boardwalk.

“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.”

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said people were stranded in Atlantic City, which sits on a barrier island and was mostly underwater late Monday. He accused the mayor of allowing them to stay there.

With the hurricane fast approaching, Christie warned it was no longer safe for rescuers, and advised people who didn’t evacuate the barrier islands to “hunker down” until morning.

Atlantic City emergency personnel said flooding had gotten so bad in some places that they were using lifeboats to evacuate residents.

And at one point Monday, officials said, flooding near the convention hall had gotten so bad that ambulances stationed there were unable to leave.

Stranded residents nearby wandered the streets stopping firefighters for assistance.

Atlantic City firefighters said they had been called back to stations and headquarters at the Convention Center and told to stop responding to all the calls coming in. They would now be prioritized.

“We’ve been responding to electrical fires, odor of gas, people who are sorry they stayed,” said one firefighter. “There’s not much to do about it at this point.”

Pete Wilson, who owns an antique shop in Cape May, N.J., at the state’s southern tip and directly in Sandy’s path, said the water was 6 inches above the bottom edge of the door. He had already taken a truckload of antiques out but was certain he would take a big hit.

“My jewelry cases are going to be toast,” he said. “I am not too happy. I am just going to have to wait, and hopefully clean up.”

Foam was spitting like soap suds, 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 3-mile sand-sliver of a town where the ocean joined the joined the Shrewsbury River.

In Maryland, at least 100 feet of a fishing pier at the beach resort of Ocean City was destroyed, and Gov. Martin O’Malley said there would be devastating flooding from the swollen Chesapeake Bay.

“There will be people who die and are killed in this storm,” he said.

Sandy packed “astoundingly low” barometric pressure, giving it terrific energy to push water inland, said Kerry Emanuel, a professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Forecasters said tropical-storm force winds could stretch north to Canada and west to the Great Lakes, where flood warnings were issued Sunday.

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it sent additional inspectors to 10 nuclear power plants from Maryland to Connecticut, and issued the employees satellite telephones.

Procedures require the sites to be shut before winds are forecast to exceed hurricane force, the commission said Monday in a statement.

The commission said an “unusual event” was declared about 6 p.m. CST when water reached a high level at a nuclear plant in Oyster Creek, N.J. The situation was upgraded less than two hours later to an “alert,” the second-lowest in a four-tiered warning system.

Federal officials said all nuclear plants are still in safe condition. They said water levels near Oyster Creek, which is along the Atlantic Ocean, would likely recede within a few hours.

Oyster Creek went online in 1969 and provides 9 percent of New Jersey’s electricity.

At least half a million people had been ordered to evacuate, including 375,000 from low-lying parts of New York City, and by the afternoon authorities were warning that it could be too late for people who had not left already.

Millions of people stayed home from work. Sheila Gladden evacuated her home in Philadelphia’s flood-prone Eastwick neighborhood, which took on 5 1/2 feet of water during Hurricane Floyd in 1999, and headed for a hotel.

“I’m not going through this again,” she said.

Those who stayed behind had few ways to get out. New York’s subways, which serve 5 million people a day, were shut down. The Holland Tunnel connecting New York to New Jersey was closed, as was a tunnel between Brooklyn and Manhattan, and the city planned to shut down the Brooklyn Bridge, the George Washington, the Verrazano-Narrows and several other spans because of high winds.

Water may pile up on the south shore of Lake Michigan, Louis Uccellini, director of environmental prediction for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Monday.

That’s because of the difference in barometric pressure between the hybrid storm and the calmer weather to the west, Uccellini said.

Stock and bond markets were closed Monday and today, the first shutdown since the days after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and the first two-day closing of the stock market because of weather since a blizzard in 1888. The New York Stock Exchange is inside the mandatory evacuation zone in lower Manhattan, blocks from New York Harbor.

If the storm reaches the higher estimate of $20 billion in damage, that would put it ahead of Hurricane Irene, which raked the Northeast in August 2011 and caused $16 billion in damage. Hurricane Katrina, which killed 1,200 people, cost $108 billion.

Information for this article was contributed by Katie Zezima, Erin McClam, Seth Borenstein, Allen G. Breed, David Porter, Wayne Parry, Jennifer Peltz, Tom Hays, Karen Matthews, Colleen Long, Deepti Hajela, Larry Neumeister, Frank Eltman, Meghan Barr and David Dishneau of The Associated Press; by James Barron, Peter Applebome, Charles V. Bagli, Joseph Berger, Nina Bernstein, Cara Buckley, Russ Buettner, David W. Chen, Annie Correal, Sam Dolnick, Christopher Drew, David W. Dunlap, Ann Farmer, Lisa W. Foderaro, Joseph Goldstein, David M. Halbfinger, Elizabeth A. Harris, Winnie Hu, Jon Hurdle, Thomas Kaplan, Corey Kilgannon, John Leland, RandyLeonard, Patrick McGeehan, Jad Mouawad, Colin Moynihan, Sarah Maslin Nir, Sharon Otterman, William K. Rashbaum, Ray Rivera, Liz Robbins, Wendy Ruderman, Nate Schweber, Michael Schwirtz, Mosi Secret, Kirk Semple, Joe Sharkey, Brian Stelter, Kate Taylor, Julie Turkewitz, Matthew L. Wald, Michael Wilson, Michael Winerip, Vivian Yee and Kate Zernike of The New York Times; by Frank Kummer, Amy S. Rosenberg, Aubrey Whelan, Jacqueline L. Urgo, Jason Nark and Aubrey Whelan of The Philadelphia Inquirer; by Mark Drajem, Kasia Klimasinska and Christine Harvey of Bloomberg News.

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Front Section, Pages 1 on 10/30/2012

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