How New York, New Jersey bore the brunt of death and
devastation
NOAA satellite image taken Monday, Oct. 29, 2012 shows Hurricane Sandy off the Mid Atlantic coastline moving toward the north. Hurricane Sandy wheeled toward land as forecasters feared, raking cities along the Northeast corridor with rain and wind gusts, flooding shore towns, washing away a section of the Atlantic City Boardwalk, and threatening to cripple Wall Street and New York's subway system with a huge surge of corrosive seawater.
BY GINGER ADAMS OTIS / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2013,
The second-costliest storm in America’s history started out as a warm tickle of moist, humid air off the coast of Africa, wrapped inside a large tropical wave traveling west.
The elongated trough, formed Oct. 11, carried an aberrant configuration of low pressure from the eastern edge of the Atlantic Basin. It coalesced into a speedy mass as it journeyed across the water.
By the time it motored into the southern Caribbean sea Oct. 22, spitting thunderstorms and covering the Nicaraguan coast in dark clouds, meteorologists in Miami and Cuba watched it with wary eyes.
The erratic weather system, whipping winds at 40 mph, had already gained enough velocity to be classified as a tropical storm. Yet just 48 hours laters, scientists at Miami’s National Hurricane Center had to upgrade it again.
Tropical Storm Sandy, as it had been officially named, became a Category 1 hurricane just in time for its Oct. 24 touchdown in Jamaica. Its 80-mph winds screeched over the island as the storm’s outer rings dumped 20 inches of rain across Haiti. Floods and mudslides there killed 50.
Inside the eye of the storm, raging winds fed off the energy generated by the Caribbean’s warm waters. Sandy’s center turned, and in the traditional pathway for late-season hurricanes, headed directly for Cuba.
In Miami, James Franklin, the branch chief of the hurricane specialist unit, got some disturbing news from his forecasters.
JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Sea water floods the Ground Zero construction site on Monday, Oct. 29, 2012, as Hurricane Sandy forced the shutdown of mass transit, schools and financial markets.
There was something strange about Sandy.
“We knew several days in advance of the storm’s landfall in New Jersey that there was a potential problem,” said Franklin. “Our challenge was how to give the right warnings to prepare people for it.”
What his scientists were seeing on their computer screens was a worst-case scenario of bad weather collisions — a hot, heavy, thunderstorm-filled hurricane on a path to careen into a series of cold fronts coming down the U.S. east coast.
“Hurricanes are usually tightly focused storms with strong winds relatively close to center,” Franklin said. “Winter time lows, however, are structured differently, and intensify differently. They can cover a much wider area.”
If the disparate systems merged, Sandy had the potential to grow infinitely stronger and broader — and its size would produce an almost unimaginable storm surge, Franklin realized.
Adding to the potential witch’s brew was a high-pressure cold front that scientists spotted hovering off the North Atlantic coast around Baltimore. It was blocking the usual path out to sea that tropical cyclones typically followed as they swirled northward — and it was strong enough to spin Sandy around.
That meant all of Sandy’s destructive energy could be forced inland, right across the densely packed New Jersey and New York shores.
“We’ve never had such a challenging scenario,” Franklin said.
JOHN MINCHILLO/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Vehicles sit trapped in high floodwater during storm surge from Hurricane Sandy near the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel on Oct. 29, 2012.
As his team conferred minute-to-minute with meteorologists and emergency management personnel up and down the East Coast, Sandy bashed Santiago de Cuba — a historic city on Cuba’s southeast coast — with 110 mph winds Oct. 26.
From there it took a bead on the Bahamas, flowing over the small island a day later, then dipping and veering eastward toward Florida.
Watching the data flickering across their computers, Franklin’s team realized Sandy had already absorbed one cold weather front. Instead of losing its hot, humid tropical center, the storm gained a tough outer shell of freezing cold rain, wind and rain.
Sandy was now a snowstorm wrapped around a hurricane.
“I think that was the first time the Hurricane Center had to put out a snow advisory,” noted Franklin.
Re-energized, Sandy pushed northward on a parallel track toward Georgia and up the coast.
It was already roiling New York waters. On Saturday, Oct. 27, Sandy got hold of one of its earliest U.S. victims. Kayaker Jet Krumwiede, 21, drowned after rough waters tossed him into the Long Island Sound near his Milford, Conn., home.
Over the next 24 hours, Sandy’s winter exterior lashed as far inland as West Virginia, which got a freezing dose of wind and snow in its Appalachian peaks, as did several surrounding states. Meanwhile, it’s tropical core and brutal winds threw waves and water with tremendous force.
DAVID HANDSCHUH/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Helicopter views of damage from Hurricane Sandy last October. More than 100 homes burned in Breezy Point.
With the death toll in the Caribbean already estimated at 70 and casualties mounting in the U.S., New York, Maryland, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania declared a state of emergency — even as a second bizarre configuration of weather gave Sandy an extra kick.
“That second winter system helped the fronts already around Sandy get stronger and bigger,” Franklin said. “In terms of its size, it was accurate to call it a monster.”
Near Hatteras, North Carolina, a wooden replica of the H.M.S Bounty broke apart under the pounding surf as crewmembers scrambled to escape the sinking vessel. Fourteen survived — plucked from the water by the Coast Guard — but 42-year-old Claudene Christian drowned before she could be saved. The body of the ship’s captain, Robin Walbridge, 63, was declared missing at sea.
At Franklin’s Hurricane Center, meteorologists realized Sandy had grown into something beyond their usual classification system. Aided by a full moon and cold weather, Sandy was morphing into a powerful, superstorm hybrid with killer winds capable of flogging waves into a convulsive frenzy — and it was about to turn inland.
As morning dawned Oct. 29, Sandy hit the robust, high-pressure front blocking its path out to sea. With nowhere else to go, the vast storm turned northwest — taking a rare curve as it expanded into a massive tempest covering an estimated 820 miles.
That odd trajectory meant the tropical cyclone’s powerful right side — the one with the fiercest winds that was usually pointed out to sea — faced New York, making its wallop even harder.
In New York and New Jersey, emergency personnel raced to prepare for the monster superstorm that was shape-shifting toward land, heralded by a mammoth storm surge.
PEARL GABEL/PEARL GABEL FOR NEW YORK DAILY N
Floods and fire destroyed several houses on Beach 129th Street in Rockaway, Queens.
N.J. Gov. Chris Christie had already ordered Jersey Shore and barrier island residents to evacuate, and even the casinos in Atlantic City had to shutter by 4 p.m. Sunday, about 24 hours before the worst of the storm was scheduled to hit.
Trains and planes along the Northeast were grounded. Tunnels in and out of New York City were closed by Sunday evening and the subway system suspended as Mayor Bloomberg ordered evacuations of low-lying areas around the city. Broadway shows were canceled.
“Let me stress that we are ordering the evacuation for the safety of approximately 375,000 people who live in these areas,” Bloomberg said at a late-afternoon press conference Sunday. “We will certainly get through this, but we would like to get through this with nobody getting hurt.”
Residents below 39th St. along 1st Ave. in Manhattan, down the East River through the Financial District and Battery Park City and up the West Side Highway to 60th St. were urged to find shelter on higher ground. The same orders covered Staten Island’s shore areas, Brooklyn’s Coney Island and The Rockaways in Queens.
But not everybody heeded the warnings.
At 8 p.m. Oct. 29, after hours of increasing wind, rain and surging seas, Sandy roared into the tri-state area for real, making landfall at Brigantine, New Jersey.
Its cyclone winds extended 175 miles from the storm’s eye, and ripple effects from a post-tropical nor’easter were felt across the entirety of New York, all the way to the Great Lakes.
Swooping and lunging into New York harbor with a peak wave of 32.5 feet, the storm crashed over the protective seawall at Battery Park City.
DEBRA L ROTHENBERG/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Storm cut a devastating chunk from this house on the Jersey Shore.
It sent surges 14 feet high — the highest ever recorded in New York Habor — smashing into the city’s subway system, flooding its tunnels, ripping through debris and filling the Hugh Cary Tunnel to Brooklyn.
Houses on the city’s edges cracked apart amid the water’s incredible force. Entire structures were gutted in an instant, furniture, family heirlooms, even cars bobbing away into the night.
For the residents trying to brave it out, the water was inescapable as it rampaged through neighborhoods without mercy, on the verge of swamping the bulk of the city.
Almost immediately, Sandy claimed more victims.
Lauren Abraham, 23, was barefoot in her front yard in Richmond Hill, Queens, around 8:30 p.m. shooting video of the incoming storm on her iPhone when she stepped on a power line pulled down by heavy winds.
Anthony Narh, 58, a Ghanaian immigrant who was called in to work at Empire Parking even though it was in the heart of Tribeca’s evacuation zone, drowned as tons of water gushed into the basement garage.
Frank Suber was on a sidewalk at 90 Broad St. when the storm surge swept him off his feet and through a revolving door into a commercial building, where he drowned.
Vernie Mathison, 61, died in his West Orange, N.J., home after the power went out and his oxygen machine stopped working.
JAMES KEIVOM/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
A 168-foot tanker, the John B. Caddell, rests on the shore in Staten Island after Hurricane Sandy.
George Tatay, 61, of Brick, got trapped in his New Jersey house and drowned.
In Brooklyn, young friends Jessie Streich-Kest, 24, and Jacob Vogelman, 24, were crushed by an uprooted tree while walking Kest’s dog in Ditmas Park.
Young brothers Brendan and Connor Moore, 2 and 4, were sucked out of the hands of their mother Glenda Moore as she struggled to escape the swirling flood waters that overran much of Staten Island.
Unlikely saviors sprang into action, like Dylan Smith, 23, a lifeguard who used his surfboard to help save six lives as Sandy raged, and Pete Vadola, a Staten Islander who went back and forth in the rising water to motor 200 people to safety.
Elsewhere, EMTs, firefighters, cops, transit workers, electricians and others fought to keep power outages from spreading and move people to safety.
Local schools were turned into makeshift shelters to absorb the displaced.
The nightmarish conditions extended across Coney Island, the Rockaways and Long Island.
Spouting floodwaters turned iconic boardwalks into matchsticks, upended historic amusement park rides and trapped thousands in attics, on roofs or on upper floors — particularly the elderly and those living in projects.
TODD MAISEL/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Gas lines form on the second day after Hurricane Sandy.
“The full moon came out at one point and it was something out of a cartoon. I saw cars float at me, branches floating at me. I’ve surfed some of the biggest waves in the world and that was the scariest s--- I’ve ever seen in my life," pro surfer Will Skudin, then 27, told The News.
Skudin jumped on his jet ski and searched Long Beach, L.I. for anyone in need, even as the deluge filled his own home on the barrier island.
“I knew there was a chance people could drown,” he said. “We knew we weren’t going to get to all of Long Beach.”
As the rampant seawater poured into the old, wooden homes lining Breezy Point, a loose electrical wire caught fire and sparked a massive blaze that threatened the beachfront community’s 2,800 homes.
Even with the rain and flooding, Sandy’s winds spread the red-hot embers with ruthless efficiency among the dense wooden homes, separated on either side by just a few feet of narrow sand paths.
The conflagration erupted into a six-alarm fire, but local volunteer fire units and the FDNY were hamstrung by the flooded streets, which held up to 12 feet of water.
As firefighters battled to save buildings in Breezy, others fought to save lives at NYU Langone Hospital. The hospital on the West Side of Manhattan was without power, and its back-up generator failed just before midnight. Nurses and doctors trekked up and down darkened stairwells to bring out 300 patients, starting with 20 babies in neo-natal intensive care.
BRYAN SMITH/FOR NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Before power was restored in the West Village, residents used a FEMA lighting stand to charge cell phones and tablets on Bleecker Street.
As the sun came up Tuesday, Oct. 30, 50 million people from Haiti to Rhode Island were without power, and huge swaths of New York and New Jersey wereswimming in wreckage. Most of Breezy Point was charred rubble.
Families who held out hope for their missing often got confronted with grim news, like the parents of off-duty Staten Island cop Artur Kasprzak.
The 28-year-old was found at 7 a.m. the day after the storm in his basement on Doty Avenue in South Beach. He’d gone there to take one last look after leading seven family members — including his 15-month-old son — to the attic to escape the deadly flood waters. As his loved ones waited through the night for him upstairs, Kasprzak, a six-year veteran of the NYPD, lay dead below, the victim of accidental electrocution.
In New Jersey, the historic roller coaster at Seaside Heights lay half submerged in water, tumbled by Sandy’s wrath. Nearly all the beach front properties in wealthy Mantoloking were obliterated.
“You could stand near the bay and you could see all the way through to the ocean,” recalled Chris Nelson, 41, who is now working as a special counsel to the mayor of Mantoloking. “No sand dunes. No homes. Just a straight shot.”
Channels of water had split the town into three segments.
After the storm, much of the Jersey Shore was sealed off. National guardsmen patrolled the streets — and Barnegat Bay — to guard against looters. It wasn’t until weeks later that residents were allowed to visit their homes. They congregated at central meeting areas and were transported in by bus. It wasn’t long before everyone on the bus was crying. People would be led to their homes by state troopers and national guardsmen who were crying as well.
“One out of every four homes was gone,” recalled Richie Fitzpatrick, 58, a retired firefighter who owns a house in Ortley Beach. “It was really rough.”
DAVID HANDSCHUH/NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Just three days after the storm, pride and plans to rebuild were surfacing in Breezy Point.
Similar devastation wracked Staten Island, Coney Island, Long Island and The Rockaways. Some 106 fires citywide were attributed to Sandy, including 21 fires during the storm and 85 later blazes linked to its damage.
As many as 3,000 people whose homes were too damaged to return to needed semi-permanent housing from the city, and federal emergency agencies rushed to bring food, water and clothes to storm-torn neighborhoods. Lack of electricty partially paralyzed the city, leaving some 80,000 tenants in New York City Housing Authority projects in Lower Manhattan, Coney Island and Far Rockaway without basic services.
Twelve days after the surge, 35,000 NYCHA residents still had no heat or hot water and 13,000 remained in the dark, unable to leave their apartments because of blacked-out elevators. NYCHA Chairman John Rhea was blasted by tenants and elected officials for having no plan and moving at a snail’s pace to accept generators and temporary boilers from the feds.
President Obama, then just weeks away from re-election, flew into New Jersey to assess the damage. He got a warm welcome from Gov. Christie, who enraged his fellow GOPers for praising Obama’s swift promise of disaster aid — even as Christie had to set rations for 12 counties due to extreme gas shortages.
In New York, major swaths of the crippled city remained in blackness throughout the week, public transportation was at a standstill in the floodzones and Mayor Bloomberg roused intense ire when he refused to cancel the Nov. 3 marathon.
Epic lines and frustration exploded around empty gas pumps and Bloomberg — confronted with outraged Sandy victims, some still living in schools even as the Dept. of Education tried to send students back to class — finally gave in and stopped the race.
New York City, like storm-ravaged communities up and down the coast, limped its way back to a semblance of its former self in the weeks and months that followed Sandy, although for many families and neighborhoods, life was forever altered.
In its wake, Sandy left a $65 billion price tag, and ultimately affected about 60 million people.
Some 24,000 families are registered with the city’s Build it Back program, which will pay for home repairs and flood-proof them for future storms — something likely to happen as the world’s sea levels uniformly rise.
The transit system, after a year of intense labor, is almost back to normal. Members of Transit Workers Union Local 100 restored the Rockaway Line, repaired damage at transit yards, shops and other facilities, repaired damage to security equipment and are still working inside the Montague and Greenpoint Tubes.
Over the past 12 months, NYC Transit employees have logged 2,300,000 hours on Sandy Recovery & Resiliency projects, installed 100 miles of new cable, moved 32,000 tons of debris and repaired 46,000 miles of track.
As more money trickles in from the federal government — which has only released about $700 million of the roughly $60 billion in storm recovery aid — reconstruction projects hopefully will speed up.
The city says future building will be done with the possibility of “superstorms” in mind, with big investments in the transportation and electrical infrastructures that took such a terrible beating.
Already, environmental steps are being taken to strengthen natural defenses: about 1.2 million cubic yards of sand have been dumped on beaches on Staten Island, Coney Island and the Rockaway peninsula to fortify the shore.
Sandy’s terrifying intensity rewrote the psyche of a city that once believed itself safe from the harrowing harm of big Atlantic storms. But a year later, New Yorkers can take some comfort in knowing the city’s trying to learn from its harsh lesson.
The Rockaways still need help.
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