bopes
08-08-2007, 08:03 AM
If anyone lives or works in the NYC area I wonder how they coped with getting into work this morning. Me personally, I should have stood in bed. For those not from around here, there was short but intense thunderstorm this morning about 5 or six am that flooded all the subways and screwed up all the roads and trains into and out of the city.
Took me three hours to get to my job (a 'burb job that I have to drive to) which normally takes no more than 45 minutes.
If all it takes is a dinky storm to paralyze the tri-state area, we're doomed. All the terra-ists have to do is cut a fart in our direction, at this point.
I could have got to work quicker on a pogo stick.
sidecross
08-08-2007, 08:43 AM
'He said 1.7 inches of rain fell in Central Park between 6 and 7 a.m.'
August 8, 2007
New York City Transit System Is Crippled by Flooding
By GRAHAM BOWLEY and JOHN HOLUSHA
Powerful thunderstorms swept through the New York metropolitan area this morning, tearing up trees and damaging cars and homes, and creating havoc during the morning commute.
Subway stations were flooded, forcing commuters out onto the streets and into taxis and buses, and bringing traffic in many areas to a standstill. The region’s three major airports — La Guardia, Kennedy and Newark — all reported flight cancellations and delays.
No subway line was unaffected by the heavy rains and winds, according to the M.T.A. For the time being, the M.T.A. was advising commuters to stay at home.
Train delays and cancellations were reported on the Long Island Railroad and Metro-North, and train and bus delays and cancellations were reported on New Jersey transit. As the storm knocked down power lines, thousands of homes were without power.
An M.T.A. spokesman said train and bus services were expected to return to normal by about noon.
Meteorologist Brian Ciemnecki of the National Weather Service said an investigator would be sent to the scene to determine if a tornado was responsible, The Associated Press reported.
But Jeff Warner, a meteorologist at Penn State University, said no tornados formed or touched down. He said 1.7 inches of rain fell in Central Park between 6 and 7 a.m., and recent hot, humid weather powered clusters of thunderstorms over Pennsylvania and lower New York State that moved through the metropolitan area.
Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for New York City Transit, said: “We’re coming back slowly. We have to dry out we have to clean up and then we have to make sure the circuits and the signals are working before we resume service.”
For the latest service information, please see the Times’ City Room blog.
Alfonso Quiroz, a Consolidated Edison spokesman, said that about 4,000 customers throughout the city were without power — including 1,500 on Staten Island and 1,000 in the Bronx — largely because the storm knocked down power lines.
Amid the commuter havoc, M.T.A.’s website, mta.info, shut down. It was the second time in several weeks that the website was not able to function during a transit crisis. The last one was during a minor blackout on the east side of Manhattan several weeks ago.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg was to give a press conference this morning in the Bay Ridge district of Brooklyn, one of the areas hard hit by the storm.
“It looked like tornado activity, a very dense black wall, almost like a heavy velvet fog,” said J. R. Thomason, a fundraiser for the New York Philharmonic, who watched the storm from an attic room in a three-story house in the Kensington district of Brooklyn between 6 and 7 a.m.
“It was over very fast, within 30 seconds,” he said. In a nearby street, a large tree had crushed a van and its branches stretched across the road, stopping traffic. In Brooklyn, the F train was delayed, and as trains started up again later in the morning, subway cars were way overcrowded.
John Han, 50, a financial adviser, said he arrived at the Fort Hamilton stop at around 7:45 a.m., but about an hour later had given up and was going home.
“The cars are running, but real slow,” he said, accompanied by his wife. “It looked like a sardine can. We are going home and taking a shower and going to try again, because we are very sweaty.”
Around Brooklyn, motorists drove in search of an open subway line, so that they could park and take the train. In the Kensington area of Brooklyn, leaves and other debris littered the street, trash cans were knocked over, and awnings on stores were ripped. On the corner of Dahill Road and Church Avenue, trees blocked road lanes, and a 30 foot long pizzeria sign was down on the sidewalk.
Pete Chiaramonte, 41, who was on his way to work at a towing company, said he saw what he thought was the storm touching down at around 5.30 a.m. near the corner of 37th Street and 13th Avenue. “It was a funnel shape,” he said. “It looked kind of black and blue,” adding, “it was way up high and came right down on the roof of” a department store. “Pieces of the roof were all over the place. It was a big bang.”
At 370 East Second St. in Kensington, Carol Perri DeSimone, a sales representative, stood amid the remains of her porch. “I’m heartbroken, my roof landed three doors away,” she said. “I was scared to death.”
In Manhattan, the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines on the West Side, and the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 lines on the East Side shut down for a time. The 42nd Street shuttle was also suspended. The Metro-North Railroad reported at 8:50 a.m. that services on all three of its lines had been restored, although there were significant delays coming in to Grand Central Terminal.
Subways on the Upper West Side of Manhattan were flooded. Brandon Bunting, 31, a police officer on his way to John Jay School of Criminal Justice at 59th and 10th Avenue, said “This is crazy,” as he emerged from the subway station at 86th and Central Park West.
He said he had spent almost an hour on the train as it stopped and started about every 20 minutes, either in a station or between stations, and had finally given up.
Others left the station to try to catch buses or taxis.
As the storms moved across the region from west to east, Long Island was hit by winds and rains. Flooding on the tracks at Bayside, forced the Long Island Rail Road to suspend service on its Port Washington Branch early in the rush hour as torrential downpours swept through Queens and Nassau counties.
The railroad also suspended service to the Hunterspoint Avenue station in western Queens, where passengers from the railroad’s diesel branches make subway connections for the east side of Manhattan.
Trains on the main line through Mineola were delayed by flooding east of the station, the railroad said in a service advisory.
The railroad seemed to have been taken by surprise by the flooding problems. Passengers were allowed to board a Manhattan-bound express train at Port Washington at the height of the storm, and then were told a few minutes after the train’s scheduled 6:45 a.m. departure time that flooding at Bayside was interfering with service and that the crew did not know how long the delay would last.
The train sat in the station for more than an hour with its doors open as lightning struck nearby and the intensity of the rainstorm mounted and ebbed, then finally died away.
Around 7:45 a.m., train crew members began asking passengers whether they thought it would be worthwhile for the train to make its way as far as Great Neck, where they might be able to make connections with Queens-bound M.T.A. buses.
The railroad was trying to arrange for coaches of its own to replace suspended trains, the passengers were told, but had not yet managed to do so. Most of the passengers then gave up and walked off the train, passing under electronic signs on the platform that still, oddly, listed the next few scheduled trains on the line as operating “on time.”
By late morning in the Kensington section of Brooklyn, residents were sweeping the sidewalks and streets, and firemen were putting up yellow tape around the fallen trees.
William Neuman, Patrick J. Lyons, Sewell Chan, Ann Farmer, and Christine Hauser contributed to this article
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/nyregion/08cnd-weather.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
willoweyes
08-08-2007, 09:58 AM
that's what my bumper sticker says.
The Argons don't control anything, not even their own flesh. If each of us quits buying their template, we can free ourselves. No need for a guru or a red pill.
Start dancing, I say, as the mad populance of the middle ages danced to Jerusalem.
sidecross
08-08-2007, 03:07 PM
August 8, 2007
Tornado Hit Is Confirmed as Subway Still Struggles
By ANAHAD O’CONNOR and GRAHAM BOWLEY
Parts of the New York City subway system remained disrupted late this afternoon, primarily in Queens, as transit officials restored service to many of the waterlogged train lines in time for the evening rush hour. As commuters braced for a possibly harsh ride home, the National Weather Service confirmed that a tornado did indeed strike Brooklyn this morning.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said most of the city’s subway lines were running this evening after coming to a near standstill this morning after a torrential downpour dropped 3 inches of rain on the New York metropolitan area in a one-hour period. The heavy rains were followed by a tornado that carved a path of destruction around parts of Brooklyn.
The tornado since raged through Sunset Park and Bay Ridge, ripping the roofs off five brick rowhouses, yanking thick trees out by their roots, turning cars sideways and shattering countless windows.
According to the National Weather Service, the tornado produced winds reaching speeds of 113 to 135 miles per hour. It touched down in Bay Ridge just after 6:30 a.m. and traveled northeast, damaging homes and tearing the roof off a Nissan car dealership before dissipating.
The tornado forced the evacuation of 20 buildings, leaving 32 families without shelter, the city buildings department said. Another 50 buildings experienced some damage.
On 58th Street in Sunset Park, Lanie Mastellone watched her ceilings collapse one by one. “Then when I opened the door to get out of the actual apartment,” she said, “that’s when I realized I had no roof.”
At a news conference this afternoon, Eliott G. Sander, the chief executive of the M.T.A., suggested that many commuters who saw their trips to work this morning thrown into chaos would fare just as badly this evening. Although service was restored on most lines by this evening — including the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 lines, and the Nos. 1, 2, and 3 lines — the E, F and R lines are out of service in parts of Queens and service on the V and W lines was suspended. Shuttle buses are being run in some areas of Queens.
Service on the Metro North railroad lines, however, has mostly been restored this afternoon, and officials with both New Jersey Transit and Long Island Rail Road said they too were expecting service to be nearly back to normal.
Mr. Sander was joined at the news conference this afternoon by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who said this was the third time in seven months that a sudden downpour had brought the transit system to its knees. Mr. Spitzer ordered the M.T.A. to conduct a review of how the transit system failed and urged New Yorkers to remain patient.
“The timing and intensity of the storm took us by surprise,” Mr. Sander said. “The intensity of the storm brought torrential rainfall in a short period of time, overwhelming both our pumps and the sewer system that is needed to accept the pump water.”
As the storm knocked down power lines, more than 4,000 customers throughout the city lost power, said Alfonso Quiroz, a Consolidated Edison spokesman. Most of those customers had their power restored a short time later, and by 3 p.m., the number of customers still coping with outages had dwindled to about 800.
The destruction inflicted by the heavy rains was magnified in Brooklyn by intense winds that tore up trees and ripped apart homes and buildings. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other city officials said that at least 40 buildings had been damaged, 100 to 200 cars were smashed or hit by trees, a woman in Staten Island was killed, and at least a half a dozen people were injured — sending the toll of the damages into the tens of millions of dollars.
Meteorologists from the National Weather Service headed to Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, to inspect wind damage and to determine whether the uprooted trees and other damage were a result of tornados or simply the intense winds of the storm.
One commuter, Pete Chiaramonte, 41, who was on his way to work at a towing company in Brooklyn this morning, said he saw what he thought was the storm touching down at around 5.30 a.m. near the corner of 37th Street and 13th Avenue. “It was a funnel shape,” he said. “It looked kind of black and blue,” adding, “it was way up high and came right down on the roof of” a department store. “Pieces of the roof were all over the place. It was a big bang.”
Mayor Bloomberg said this afternoon that the city was being overwhelmed by a weather catastrophe that came in three parts: a blast of rain that flooded streets and railway systems, a vicious storm that tore through Brooklyn, and scorching temperatures that could be followed later today by even more rain.
“We expect very hot temperatures and perhaps some thunderstorms,” he said. “One of the concerns is that you have buildings without roofs and clearly more rain would do a lot more damage to those buildings.”
“Let me caution everybody,” he added. “Please try to stay indoors if possible. We’ve opened a number of cooling centers, and 311 will tell you where they are.”
Many of the weather-related injuries were broken legs and cuts and scrapes caused by shattered glass and fallen trees. The woman who was killed this morning was driving through an underpass when her car got stuck. After getting out, she was struck and killed by another car. Mayor Bloomberg said the driver of the second car had a suspended license and was arrested by the police.
“Clearly, if we hadn’t had the rain storm, this woman wouldn’t have been there,” he said.
The mayor said the M.T.A. was expecting long delays on bus and subway services throughout the day and warned that commuters should check with 311 before heading home to ensure their transit lines were operating. Paul Fleuranges, a spokesman for New York City Transit, said: “We’re coming back slowly. We have to dry out we have to clean up and then we have to make sure the circuits and the signals are working before we resume service.”
Even as city officials surveyed the damage and tried to clear away trees and debris throughout Brooklyn, it was still unclear precisely what had struck. John Christantello, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Upton, N.Y., said the storm was “definitely one of the stronger ones we’ve seen,” and said it was unclear whether it had reached the definition of a tornado.
But Jeff Warner, a meteorologist at Penn State University, said no tornados formed or touched down. He said 1.7 inches of rain fell in Central Park between 6 and 7 a.m., and recent hot, humid weather powered clusters of thunderstorms over Pennsylvania and lower New York State that moved through the metropolitan area.
It looked like tornado activity, a very dense black wall, almost like a heavy velvet fog,” said J. R. Thomason, a fundraiser for the New York Philharmonic, who watched the storm from an attic room in a three-story house in the Kensington district of Brooklyn between 6 and 7 a.m.
“It was over very fast, within 30 seconds,” he said. In a nearby street, a large tree had crushed a van and its branches stretched across the road, stopping traffic. In Brooklyn, the F train was delayed, and as trains started up again later in the morning, subway cars were way overcrowded.
Amid the commuter havoc, M.T.A.’s Web site, mta.info, shut down. It was the second time in several weeks that the Web site was not able to function during a transit crisis. The last one was during a minor blackout on the east side of Manhattan several weeks ago.
“John Han, 50, a financial adviser, said he arrived at the Fort Hamilton stop of the F train in Brooklyn at around 7:45 a.m., but about an hour later had given up and was going home.
“The cars are running, but real slow,” he said, accompanied by his wife. “It looked like a sardine can. We are going home and taking a shower and going to try again, because we are very sweaty.”
Around Brooklyn, motorists drove in search of an open subway line, so that they could park and take the train. In the Kensington area of Brooklyn, leaves and other debris littered the street, trash cans were knocked over, and awnings on stores were ripped. On the corner of Dahill Road and Church Avenue, trees blocked road lanes, and a 30-foot-long pizzeria sign was down on the sidewalk.
At 370 East Second Street in Kensington, Carol Perri DeSimone, a sales representative, stood amid the remains of her porch. “I’m heartbroken, my roof landed three doors away,” she said. “I was scared to death.” In Manhattan, the Nos. 1, 2 and 3 lines on the West Side, and the Nos. 4, 5 and 6 lines on the East Side shut down for a time. The 42nd Street shuttle was also suspended. The Metro-North Railroad reported at 8:50 a.m. that services on all three of its lines had been restored, although there were significant delays coming in to Grand Central Terminal.
Subways on the Upper West Side of Manhattan were flooded. Brandon Bunting, 31, a police officer on his way to John Jay School of Criminal Justice at 59th street and 10th Avenue, said “This is crazy,” as he emerged from the subway station at 86th Street and Central Park West.
He said he had spent almost an hour on the train as it stopped and started about every 20 minutes, either in a station or between stations, and had finally given up.
Others left the station to try to catch buses or taxis.
As the storms moved across the region from west to east, Long Island was hit by winds and rains. Flooding on the tracks at Bayside, forced the Long Island Rail Road to suspend service on its Port Washington Branch early in the rush hour as torrential downpours swept through Queens and Nassau counties.
The railroad also suspended service to the Hunterspoint Avenue station in western Queens, where passengers from the railroad’s diesel branches make subway connections for the east side of Manhattan.
Trains on the main line through Mineola were delayed by flooding east of the station, the railroad said in a service advisory.
The railroad seemed to have been taken by surprise by the flooding problems. Passengers were allowed to board a Manhattan-bound express train at Port Washington at the height of the storm, and then were told a few minutes after the train’s scheduled 6:45 a.m. departure time that flooding at Bayside was interfering with service and that the crew did not know how long the delay would last.
The train sat in the station for more than an hour with its doors open as lightning struck nearby and the intensity of the rainstorm mounted and ebbed, then finally died away.
Around 7:45 a.m., train crew members began asking passengers whether they thought it would be worthwhile for the train to make its way as far as Great Neck, where they might be able to make connections with Queens-bound M.T.A. buses.
The railroad was trying to arrange for coaches of its own to replace suspended trains, the passengers were told, but had not yet managed to do so. Most of the passengers then gave up and walked off the train, passing under electronic signs on the platform that still, oddly, listed the next few scheduled trains on the line as operating “on time.”
By late morning in the Kensington section of Brooklyn, residents were sweeping the sidewalks and streets, and firemen were putting up yellow tape around the fallen trees.
Reporting was contributed by Andy Newman, John Holusha, William Neuman, Patrick J. Lyons, Sewell Chan, Ann Farmer and Christine Hauser.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/nyregion/08cnd-weather.html?hp=&pagewanted=print
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