Swathes of the southern tip of Manhattan and the edges of Brooklyn suffered
severe damage following a 13ft storm surge that overwhelmed low-lying areas.
A city that has so often provided the backdrop for disaster movies was left
resembling the set of one.
Some of the best-known streets in the world — Fifth Avenue and Broadway — were
silent and empty; millions of residents were without power; and subway
tunnels were flooded.
But it was across the East River in Breezy Point where Sandy left its most
devastating mark. Firemen told how the storm’s unrelenting 80mph winds
caused one house fire to spread along entire streets, obliterating dozens of
family homes. “The whole neighbourhood’s gone,” said Arthur Holstrom as he
surveyed the scene.
The air was filled with the acrid smell of smoke as some homes still
smouldered, and personal belongings were strewn everywhere. No one is yet
sure what started the blaze. One theory is that a gas pipe ruptured and
exploded in one house and the wind blew embers from house to house. All the
properties were wooden.
Pat Lennon of Rockaway Point Fire department was one of almost 200 firemen who
fought the blaze for hours. “It went from house to house, real quick,”
he said. His uniform and face covered in dirt and ash, he said with
understatement that it had been “a bad night”.
It was unclear last night whether the fires had caused any deaths, but some
people in the neighbourhood had chosen to ignore mandatory evacuation calls
and had to be rescued.
Tom and Kathleen Owens and their children were among those who chose to stay.
When waves of water pummelled the house next door, and its foundations
collapsed, they quickly changed their minds. “Suddenly I looked and the
house was two feet away from ours and then it slammed into ours,” Mr
Owens said. “It was terrifying, I was praying.” Rescue and fire
services got them out, carrying the children into an inflatable boat.
The sight of New Yorkers surveying storm wreckage was one that was replicated
across the city yesterday. Lower Manhattan, one of the most visually
recognisable areas of the city, was severely hit.
At the entrance of an underground garage, just yards from New York’s financial
heart of Wall Street, crowds gathered to take photographs of five cars,
their roofs only just visible above the floodwater, which sat piled on top
of each other.
From their parking spots in the garage, the vehicles appeared to have been
engulfed by the water surging inland from the nearby East River and later
deposited in a heap.
Just a few hundred metres away is the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel which links
downtown Manhattan with the borough of Brooklyn.
The tunnel has a clearance of 12’7″. Yesterday morning it was filled to
the brim with floodwater. At the entrance ramp, barely visible, was the
outline of a van submerged in the water.
As crowds took pictures, a young man in a high-vis vest peered over a railing
at the sunken truck. “Damn,” he said. “That ain’t where I
parked it.”
The man, whose vest identified him as a member of the city’s ‘Bridge
Operations’ unit, explained that he had parked a van at each end of the
tunnel the previous evening to stop traffic entering following the closure
of the tunnel.
The floodwater, he suggested, had dragged the van almost 20 yards from where
he had left it.
Near the tunnel was the Franklin D Roosevelt Drive, one of the busiest
roadways in New York City. Yesterday it was deserted, an eerie stretch of
desolate highway.
The cobbled streets of South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan were still
partly underwater yesterday. The roads which were passable were slippy with
oil which had presumably leaked from the cars that had been engulfed by
water on Monday night.
Residents in the area told how the water had risen from the East River and
surged through the streets before subsiding.
Despite the odd fallen lamppost, many of the bars and shops in the area looked
as though they had escaped any obvious signs of damage.
However upon closer inspection the insides of the stores were wrecked,
presumably by floodwater which seeped inside the store before subsiding.
Those storefronts which had been smashed by the flood water left the streets
scattered with odd debris. Coffee sachets, clothing and even a pair of shop
mannequins were scattered across the streets.
On Maiden Lane in the Financial District, Leslie Lindsey, 36, watched late
into the night as the East River rose and poured into the Manhattan streets.
“The street was a river,” she said “I could hear people
screaming and saw cop cars reversing up the street as the water started
pouring up the road.”
Pointing to a nearby car, which had a tree on its roof, she said: “The
water was above the cars. It came all the way up the street and into the
lobby of my building. I’m on a high floor, but my car is in the garage and
it’s still under six feet of water.
“Just seeing that much water pouring towards us was frightening; really
scary. But I think we will be lucky because we live close to Wall Street.
We’ll probably get our power back on before a lot of others.”
Among the most pressing concern of New Yorkers is the return of the Subway.
The city’s transport hub was suspended on Sunday night with the hope that it
would re-open by Wednesday at the latest. Last night the hope that it would
reopen even by the end of the week looked forlorn as many downtown Subway
stations were submerged.
“It just feels like we are cut off from the rest of the city,” Miss
Lindsey said.
The residents of lower Manhattan have had much to contend with. The area still
bears the physical and emotional scars of 9/11, which took place just a few
blocks from the worst-hit area of flooding, now it will undergo a similar
rebuilding effort.
It is perhaps a testament to the city that yesterday morning, the clean-up
effort had already begun. Refuse collectors and other city officials toured
lower Manhattan clearing the streets of debris and attempting to secure
smashed storefronts.
Mary Burke, who lives on John Street, said: “When you’ve been through
something like 9/11 this is crisis-light,” she smiled, before joking: “But
when you consider what we’ve been through I sometimes think maybe I should
move. It seems like you pay a serious toll living here.”
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