Sandy

The Aftermath


Things are OK now. I didn't lose power or comms, so I have no complaints. Friends of mine in the area lost power. Certainly quite a few people wer evacuated.

The power company deliberately shut down power in lower Manhattan to prevent damage, and even at that, a power station in Alphabet City exploded a transformer. A quarter-million people in Manhattan alone are without power; another half million throughout the city are without power. Of course, the total number of people without power in the region is in the millions.

Subway service is suspended at least a few more days. Buses resume tomorrow, and I am going to attempt to make it in to the office. We're not officially closed.

Our data centers in New Jersey and lower Manhattan all lost power. The one in Manhattan also lost generator power around the time a foot of water was in the lobby. I was on a call last night basically listening to the command center just announce it was going dark and they were starting to evacuate people still in the building. The data centers in New Jersey are running on generators now. One has 7 days of gas, the other less than three, and that one is so surrounded by water that they can't get anything to it. If that doesn't change by the end of the week, those machines are going down as well.

I got a little spooked by some moaning wind at one point. Watching the news this morning, I was moved to near-tears.  It's pretty devastating, but I'm reasonably certain things will be running again soon. No pun intended - the marathon is still on for this weekend.

I did get out to help clean out one of my kayak clubs' boathouses. The water came up to about chest height in the boathouse - say 4.5 feet. The garage door was damage, and some panels from retaining walls floated away. A decoratie arch was split in half when the gangway was lifted into it by the surge, and our garden was ravaged pretty badly. Still, it could have been worse. There is a construction site next door and we were worried their office trailed was going to smash into our tender tin-walled shack.

So, yeah. show's over. Now it's just cleanup.