News stories coming in were pretty dramatic: storm surges in Battery Park, Atlantic City being under water. The first fatality came not too long afterwards; a 30 year old man in Flushing was killed in bed when a tree fell on his house. There's an explosion at a power substation in Manhattan. Backup generators at an NYU hospital fails and emergency workers are frantically trying to get dozens of babies transferred to another hospital. We nervously look around whenever the wind picks up; I mentally brace myself for the electricity to suddenly cut out. I even receive an automated call from ConEd saying that they may cut power to the area preemptively.
And yet... the power holds up, even as the storm reaches its plateau and then oh so slowly starts to lessen. I wake up Tuesday morning, and we still have power! Yay! Looking at the news broadcasts today, I think we have gotten incredibly lucky. A stroll outside shows amazingly little damage to our neighborhood... we didn't even see any downed trees!
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| Picture of my block. Looks like someone swept the sidewalk already! |
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| A few downed branches at the park |
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| This is probably the extent of the damage that we saw |
We're not completely out of the woods yet though. All public transportation is still down, and it sounds like it will take days (if not longer) for full service to be restored. Luckily, the subway line near our apartment doesn't go through an underground tunnel into Manhattan (those are currently flooded with seawater); instead, it crosses via the Manhattan Bridge. So... hopefully that means service can be restored faster.
Still, it feels good to have escaped this storm unscathed, unlike so many other people who live in this area. Hopefully life will return to normal for them very soon as well.
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