By JAMES BARRON
Published: August 27, 2011
New York became a city without one of its trademarks — the nation’s largest subway system — on Saturday as Hurricane Irene charged northward and the city prepared to face powerhouse winds that could drive a wall of water over the beaches in the Rockaways and between the skyscrapers in Lower Manhattan.
The city worked to complete its evacuation of about 370,000 residents in low-lying areas where officials expected flooding to follow the storm, and the transportation system — the subways, along with buses and commuter rail lines — shut down at noon. Police officers sounded the warning, strolling along subway platforms and telling people the next train would be the last. The conductor of a No. 4 train that pulled into the Borough Hall station in Brooklyn at 12:14 p.m. had the same message.
“This is it,” he said, smiling. “You’re just in time.”
Soon subway employees were stretching yellow tape across the entrances to stations to keep people from going down the steps and into an underground world that was suddenly off limits, but not deserted. Transit workers were charged with executing a huge, mostly underground ballet, moving 200 subway trains away from outdoor yards that could flood if the storm delivered the 6 to 12 inches of rain that forecasts called for. The trains were to be parked in underground tunnels across the city, making regular runs impossible.
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that mass transit was “unlikely to be back” in service on Monday. The mayor also said that electricity could be knocked out in Lower Manhattan if Consolidated Edison to shut off the power pre-empt the problems that flooding could cause for its cables.
“This is just the beginning,” the mayor said at a morning news conference on Coney Island, where he and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly inspected boats that emergency workers could use in neighborhoods they could not travel through any other way. “This is a life-threatening storm,” he added.
Mr. Bloomberg said the evacuation and the transit shutdown, actions he said had never been ordered before, were proceeding as well as could be expected, with officials going door to door in high-rise housing projects and firefighters driving school buses to help get homebound residents out of low-lying neighborhoods.Phyllis Rhodie, 48, boarded such a bus outside the Redfern Houses in the slender peninsula of the Rockaways. She took along her boyfriend, three children, water, food, some medical supplies — and a case of nerves.
“I’m staying wherever they can put me up,” she said.
And while hundreds of city employees worked in emergency shelters, hundreds of National Guard troops prepared to fan out across the city and Long Island. Scores gathered at the 69th Regiment Armory, on Lexington Avenue at East 26th Street, awaiting their orders.
The storm caused major disruptions long before the first bands of rain swirled by. The three major airports in the New York region stopped clearing flights for landing at noon. Officials said they would remain open for planes that wanted to take off, but most flights had been canceled on Friday, according to Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Supermarkets and hardware stores were jammed on Saturday morning, as they had been the previous day, as New Yorkers who did not have to evacuate stocked up on provisions. They worried that skyscraper windows could shatter and papers and even furniture could be sucked out. They worried that trees in parks could be uprooted and go flying, creating a deadly whirlwind that could do more damage.
They watched as workers stacked sandbags around subway grates near the East River, which is expected to surge as the hurricane passes by. And police trucks with loudspeakers crawled through low-lying neighborhoods, broadcasting warnings to people who had not already left on their own.
The National Weather Service said the storm would churn along the Interstate 95 corridor, keeping up its 14-mile-an-hour pace. That would bring the center to the New York area by Sunday afternoon — probably east of the city on Long Island, forecasters said, although they cautioned that the path could change at any moment. The city had been under a hurricane warning, its first since 1985, since Friday afternoon.
0 Comments