Apr 16, 2007 1:15 am US/Eastern
Storm Watch: New York Takes A Pounding
by Brendan Keefe
BROOKLYN (CBS/AP) ―
New York City was socked by record breaking rain on Sunday. Huge waves caused beach erosion along, with record rainfall and wind gusts approaching 50 mph.
The nor'easter that battered the region grounded hundreds of commercial airline flights, halted commuter trains on their tracks and caused severe flooding.
More than 5.5 inches of rain fell in the New York region Sunday, shattering a record that had stood for more than 100 years, the National Weather Service said. The previous record for an April 15, measured in Central Park, was 1.8 inches in 1906.
Water caused significant damage throughout the city. Drains overflowed, and water seeped into manholes, shorting out electrical cables.
More than 400 flights were canceled Sunday at the region's three major airports, and fallen tree limbs cut power supplies to more than 10,000 households.
Thousands of passengers were stranded because the Metro-North Railroad suspended service on two of its branches for several hours because of flooding.
New York City opened nine emergency storm shelters in flood-prone locations, and ferry service to Fire Island was canceled due to the storm.
There were sustained winds of 30 to 35 mph and gusts of up to 48 mph at John F. Kennedy International airport. Sunday night's high tide was likely to bring coastal flooding on Long Island and in parts of New York City, the weather service said.
A spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which manages all three of the area's major airports, said travelers should check with their carriers before heading to Kennedy, LaGuardia or Newark (N.J.) Liberty International airports. "There are delays in excess of a couple of hours," spokesman Pasquale DiFulco said.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in a briefing at the city's emergency management office, advised residents to stay out of the streets because of the potential for falling trees or branches and downed power lines. He suggested staying home during the storm and reading a good book or catching up on sleep.
"Stay inside and relax," he said. "The rains have been pretty much what was forecast, and fortunately the winds have been a little lighter than forecast."
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had hundreds of extra workers on duty to handle flooding and other storm-related problems with its commuter rail lines and New York City buses and subways, Executive Director Elliot Sander said. Still, the MTA's Metro-North suspended service on its Harlem and New Haven lines for hours because of flooding in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx. Service was restored around 8 p.m.
Flooding stalled traffic along parkways and forced residents in at least one Queens neighborhood to paddle through streets in boats. The water turned parking lots and driveways in Bayville on Long Island into pools. Residents were waiting anxiously for high tide in coastal areas, which could cause more flooding.
The storm rattled the Gulf states Friday and Saturday with violent thunderstorms, raked Texas with at least two tornadoes and was blamed for five deaths before heading toward the northeast coast.
State work crews west of Albany were getting snow plows out of storage and reattaching them to trucks in anticipation of snow that could be heavy in some small pockets, said the state's deputy secretary for public safety, Michael Balboni.
New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer said he also deployed 3,200 members of the National Guard to areas that might be affected by the storm.
George Hafele, president of Fire Island Ferries, said ferry service was suspended after 8 a.m. Sunday.
"For us the big problem is tide," he said. "We're sitting here watching the tide come up dramatically."
The Long Island Power Authority said about 7,500 customers lost power across the island Sunday, mainly because of tree limbs falling on power lines, but most were restored. The peak number of outages was more than 3,000.
A Consolidated Edison utility spokesman said there were about 3,400 households in Westchester County and New York City without power; of those, 1,700 were in Westchester and at least 1,000 were in the Elmhurst neighborhood in Queens. Much of the service was expected to be restored by midnight.
In New York City, the mayor's Office of Emergency Management opened shelters at nine public schools in the five boroughs Sunday morning, the first time such a step had been taken since 1999.
The shelters were opened as a precaution, but only two people were using them as of Sunday evening, the mayor said.
The American Red Cross opened three shelters at high schools in Nassau County.
"We hope we will not need these shelters, but at this point we cannot afford to take any chances," Nassau Red Cross CEO Frank Cassano said.
Spitzer said Saturday that the storm could cause the most flooding New York has seen since a December 1992 nor'easter, which washed away beach and sand dunes, knocked out power and left thousands of people temporarily homeless, their houses standing in feet of water.
In the coastal Seagate section of Brooklyn, which suffered major flooding in the 1992 storm, residents placed sandbags in the streets on Sunday.
"Everybody remembers that (1992 storm)," resident Jose Serrano said. "Everybody's home got ruined. Some houses got underwater. It was up to your stomach."
(© 2007 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)
