Superstorm Sandy Live Updates, Photos: Hudson River Flooding, ConEd Outages & More

Posted on October 30, 2012 by Jean

AP/The Huffington Post    
Posted: 10/29/2012 9:40 pm
EDT Updated: 10/30/2012 12:35 am EDT

Superstorm Sandy causes rising water to flood into a subterranian parking garage on October 29, 2012, in the Financial District of New York, United States.

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. (AP) — Superstorm Sandy slammed into the New Jersey coastline with 80 mph winds Monday night and hurled an unprecedented 13-foot surge of seawater at New York City, flooding its tunnels, subway stations and the electrical system that powers Wall Street. At least 13 U.S. deaths were blamed on the storm, which brought the presidential campaign to a halt a week before Election Day.
For New York City at least, Sandy was not the dayslong onslaught many had feared, and the wind and rain that sent water sloshing into Manhattan from three sides began dying down within hours.
Still, the power was out for hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and an estimated 5.2 million people altogether across the East. And the full extent of the storm’s damage across the region was unclear, and unlikely to be known until daybreak.
In addition, heavy rain and further flooding remain major threats over the next couple of days as the storm makes its way into Pennsylvania and up into New York State. Near midnight, the center of the storm was just outside Philadelphia, and its winds were down to 75 mph, just barely hurricane strength.
“It was nerve-racking for a while, before the storm hit. Everything was rattling,” said Don Schweikert, who owns a bed-and-breakfast in Cape May, N.J., near where Sandy roared ashore. “I don’t see anything wrong, but I won’t see everything until morning.”
As the storm closed in, it converged with a cold-weather system that turned it into a superstorm, a monstrous hybrid consisting not only of rain and high wind but snow in West Virginia and other mountainous areas inland.
It smacked the boarded-up big cities of the Northeast corridor – Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston – with stinging rain and gusts of more than 85 mph.
Just before Sandy reached land, forecasters stripped it of hurricane status, but the distinction was purely technical, based on its shape and internal temperature. It still packed hurricane-force wind, and forecasters were careful to say it was still dangerous to the tens of millions in its path.
Sandy made landfall at 8 p.m. near Atlantic City, which was already mostly under water and saw an old, 50-foot piece of its world-famous Boardwalk washed away earlier in the day.
Authorities reported a record surge 13 feet high at the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan, from the storm and high tide combined.
In an attempt to lessen damage from saltwater to the subway system and the electrical network beneath the city’s financial district, New York City’s main utility cut power to about 6,500 customers in lower Manhattan. But a far wider swath of the city was hit with blackouts caused by flooding and transformer explosions.

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