A HANGING RISK. Gusts from Sandy caused a crane attached to One57, a high-rise building under construction, to dangle over Manhattan. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the entire process of replacing the hanging part would take a few weeks, while New Yorkers have evacuated surrounding areas to stay safe from the crane. Photo by Louella S. Ching.
SUPERSTORM SANDY hit the East Coast of the United States on Monday around 8:00 PM ET, first crashing on southern New Jersey. As of Tuesday afternoon, Sandy’s death toll amounted to 26 lives across the country amid widespread destruction caused by the storm.
The Philippine Embassy in Washington has reported no Filipino casualties, while reminding Filipinos to stay alert indoors and remain safe from other perils brought about by Sandy.
There are currently no Ateneo students on exchange in New York. The Ateneo’s Office of International Relations, which handles exchange program agreements with schools abroad, said that Ateneo students on Junior Term Abroad (JTA) for the current fall semester in the US are in San Francisco, California and Texas. The OIR also said that students set to study in Fordham University in New York City are scheduled for the spring semester, which starts in January.
Since Thursday last week, the East Coast states have already been warned of the hurricane’s projected trajectory, as Sandy’s strong winds were still thrashing along Miami’s beaches.
New York City was among the most seriously affected, despite several days in preparation for the oncoming storm.
Last Sunday, ahead of the storm’s landfall, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered the evacuation of 375,000 residents lying on the hurricane’s path. Meanwhile, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo also announced by 7:00 PM ET of the same day that all buses, subways and commuter rail services should be shut down.
Devastation in a New York minute
New Yorkers, roughly six million of them without electricity, awoke to flooded streets, tunnels and subways, a submerged Battery Park in Lower Manhattan, a fire outbreak spanning 80 houses at Breezy Point in Queens and a snapped crane dangling from atop a 90-story luxury high-rise in Midtown Manhattan.
“The electricity was out and from 39th street down, there were no traffic lights. The roads are a mess,” said Bonnie Osborn, who left her apartment in the Manhattan East 30’s on Tuesday afternoon with a few essentials to seek shelter at the Waldorf Astoria hotel lobby.
“The Midtown tunnel is flooded right now and that’s where all the electrical cables are. I don’t want to have to go through twenty seven and a half hours of no water and electricity trapped in my apartment again,” Osborn said, referring to the ordeal she encountered during the Northeast blackout of 2003.
Osborn attributed these blackouts to the overwhelming amount of power that the city consumes on a daily basis. With a population of over eight million and the immense number of skyscrapers which the city’s skyline is known for, the city’s fully loaded power grid was not able to withstand the strength of Sandy.
Hundreds of flights were also canceled as the three New York City airports were shut down and the Terminal 2 Commuter Plane Walkway of the John F. Kennedy International Airport was severely flooded. Seven subway tunnels under the East River and six bus garages were flooded. Bridges were closed, while the Grand Central Station had ceased operations since Monday, all summing up to the worst disaster in the history of the city’s public transport service.
Vicious waves topped the seawall and inundated the financial district in Lower Manhattan, sending cars drifting against each other down streets that looked more like rivers. Trading at the New York Stock Exchange at Wall Street was closed for a second day, a first since the blizzard of March 1888.
New York University’s Tisch Hospital also evacuated more than 200 patients to other facilities after a back-up generator failed. Twenty babies from neonatal intensive care, some of them on respirators operating on battery power, also had to be moved.
“It’s kind of like being in the Titanic, like you’re stuck in a sinking ship and don’t know what’s about to happen,” said Osborn.
FIRE DURING THE STORM. At least 80 houses reportedly burned down to the ground as Sandy also caused a six-alarm fire in Breezy Point, Queens, which firefighters contained early morning of Tuesday amid strong winds and floods. Photo from the Associated Press.
A hybrid storm
Sandy brewed in the Caribbean as a tropical storm, curving out as a Category 1 hurricane into the Atlantic Ocean, where it was met with an area of high pressure that sent it spinning back to the East Coast, leaving 15 states with power outages at its wake.
On top of the 68 lives it wiped away in the Caribbean, mostly in Haiti and Cuba, this brings the total to at least 94 people, according to CNN. Bloomberg estimated the economic damage to have cost the country as much as $20 billion.
After a head-on collision with cold air flowing from the Arctic, Sandy has evolved into a snowstorm and has so far pummeled the states of Maryland, West Virginia and Tennessee with up to 26 inches of snow. Western North Carolina has also been given winter storm warnings by the National Weather Service.
As the eye of the storm continues to move inland and away from its source of moisture, which is the Atlantic Ocean, rain levels would die down. However, weather forecasters said that fierce winds would still stretch across the United States, blowing from northern Georgia into Canada and as far west as Lake Michigan.
“Ondoy is nothing compared to the devastation that Hurricane Sandy is expected to unleash,” Philippine Ambassador to the United States Jose Cuisia Jr. said as he gave caution to Filipinos living in the East Coast.
President Barack Obama has signed disaster declarations for New York and New Jersey, as well as emergency declarations for other states and the capital at Washington, D. C. Meanwhile, the rest of the country is still holding their breath.
With reports from J. A. de Lima
