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| Two women shop for groceries by flashlight in the Tribeca neighborhood of New York, Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012. ConEd cut power Moday to some neighborhoods served by underground lines as the advancing storm surge from Hurricane Sandy threatened to flood substations. Floodwaters later led to explosions that disabled a substation in Lower Manhattan, cutting power tens of thousands of customers south of 39th Street. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- Stripped of its bustle and mostly cut off from the world, New York
was left wondering Tuesday when its particular way of life - carried by
subway, lit by skyline and powered by 24-hour deli - would return.
Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and the power company said it could be several days
before the lights come on for hundreds of thousands of people plunged
into darkness by what was once Hurricane Sandy.
And
Bloomberg said it could be 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 New Yorkers under the East River were
flooded.
Sandy killed 10 people in New York
City. The dead included two who drowned in a home and one who was in bed
when a tree fell on an apartment, the mayor said. A 23-year-old woman
died after stepping into a puddle near a live electrical wire.
"This was a devastating storm, maybe the worst that we have ever experienced," Bloomberg said.
For the 8 million people who live here, the city was a different place one day after the storm.
In
normal times, rituals bring a sense of order to the chaos of life in
the nation's largest city: Stop at Starbucks on the morning walk with
the dog, drop the kids off at P.S. 39, grab a bagel.
On
Tuesday, those rituals were suspended, with little indication when they
would come back. Schools were shut for a second day and were closed
Wednesday, too.
Coffee shops, normally open as
close as a block apart, were closed in some neighborhoods. New York
found itself less caffeinated and curiously isolated from the world,
although by afternoon it had begun to struggle back to life.
Some
bridges into the city reopened at midday, but the Brooklyn-Battery
Tunnel, connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan, and the Holland Tunnel,
between New York and New Jersey, remained closed. And service on the
three commuter railroads that run between the city and its suburbs was
still suspended.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo said bus
service would be restored at 5 p.m. EDT, on a limited schedule but free.
He said he hoped there would be full service on Wednesday, also free.
The
New York Stock Exchange was closed for a second day, the first time
that has happened because of weather since the 19th century, but said it
would reopen on Wednesday.
Swaths of the city
were not so lucky. Consolidated Edison, the power company, said it
would be four days before the last of the 337,000 customers in Manhattan
and Brooklyn who lost power have electricity again.
For
the Bronx, Queens, Staten Island and Westchester County, with 442,000
outages, it could take a week, Con Ed said. Floodwater led to explosions
that disabled a power substation on Monday night, contributing to the
outages.
New Yorkers were left without power
to charge their iPods and Kindles and Nooks for the subway. Not that
there was a subway. People clustered around electrical outlets at a
Duane Reade drugstore to power up their phones.
At
a small market called Hudson Gourmet, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village,
cashiers made change by candlelight and shoppers used flashlights to
scour the shelves.
Lee Leshen used the light
from his phone to make his selections - three boxes of linguine and a
can of tomatoes. His power was out, but the gas in his stove worked, so
he could cook. He said he almost never cooks but is learning.
John
Tricoli, his wife, Christine, and their 6-year-old twins spent Monday
night holed up in their 11th-floor apartment in one of several lower
Manhattan office buildings that were converted to condos in the 2000s
and have drawn young families. Once the power went off at 7 p.m., there
was a major challenge - no TV.
By candlelight,
"we colored, we read, we played games - old school," Christine Tricoli
said as the family emerged to go on a walk on Tuesday that started with a
trek down 11 flights of stairs.
"There was even talking," she said.
The
city modified its taxi rules and encouraged drivers to pick up more
than one passenger at a time, putting New Yorkers in the otherwise
unthinkable position of having to share a yellow cab with a stranger.
Livery
cabs and black sedans, normally allowed to pick up passengers only by
arrangement, were allowed to stop for people hailing rides on the
street.
The landscape of the city changed in a matter of hours.
A
fire destroyed as many as 100 houses in a flooded beachfront
neighborhood in Queens. Firefighters said the water was chest-high on
the street and they had to use a boat to make rescues.
In
Brooklyn, Faye Schwartz surveyed the damage in her Brooklyn
neighborhood, where cars were strewn like leaves, planters were
deposited in intersections and green Dumpsters were tossed on their
sides.
"Oh, Jesus. Oh, no," she said.
The
chief line of demarcation Tuesday ran through Manhattan's Chelsea
section. Above 25th Street, delis did business and traffic lights
worked. Below 25th Street, nothing.
For some
New Yorkers, the aftermath of the storm stirred memories of the blackout
of August 2003, when a cascading power failure in the Northeast left
the city without power for parts of two days. This time, as then, there
was no sign of looting or widespread crime. Nine people in all were
arrested on charges they stole from a gas station, an electronics store
and a clothing store in Queens.
But the 2003
blackout was a communal experience, with strangers lounging on stoops
and bars blaring music into darkened neighborhoods. This time, people
had to stay indoors and wait.
At a darkened
luxury high-rise building in lower Manhattan, resident manager John
Sarich was sending porters with flashlights up and down 47 flights of
stairs to check on people who live there.
He
said most people stayed put despite calls to evacuate. One pregnant
woman started having contractions, and Sarich said that before the power
went out, he nervously researched online how to deliver a baby.
"I said, `Oh boy, I'm in trouble,'" Sarich said. The woman managed to find a cab to take her to a hospital.
Bloomberg
told reporters that the storm deaths were tragic but said the city
pulled through better than some people expected, considering the
magnitude of the storm.
The mayor said: "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."
