Hurricane Sandy speeds up as it nears Eastern seaboard
IMAGE: Waves crash over the bow of a tug boat as it passes near the Statue of Liberty in New York Monday as rough water as the result of Hurricane Sandy churned the waters of New York Harbor.
3 hr ago By MSN News with wire reports
As Hurricane Sandy nears the East Coast, residents face rising water and winds strong enough to cause a partial crane collapse at a construction project in Manhattan. Schools, Wall Street and public transportation were canceled Tuesday ahead of the storm.
NEW YORK — Forecasters say Hurricane Sandy has picked up a little strength and is making a turn toward a projected landfall on or near the southern coast of New Jersey.
The National Hurricane Center said Monday morning the storm's top sustained winds had risen to near 90 mph, with higher gusts.
The storm's center is about 260 miles south-southeast of New York City and expected to make landfall Monday evening or night along or just south of the southern New Jersey coast.
Sandy is on track to collide with a wintry storm moving in from the west and cold air streaming down from the Arctic. The combination superstorm could menace some 50 million people in the most heavily populated corridor in the nation, from the East Coast to the Great Lakes.
In New York, waves splashed over the sea walls at the southern tip of Manhattan, already at Hurricane Irene levels Monday hours before the worst of a mammoth storm was to hit the nation's largest city with a wall of water that could reach 11 feet.
Emergency workers in Manhattan were called to the scene of a crane that's dangling off a 65-story building. Television images show part of the crane hanging off the luxury building on West 57th Street. No injuries are reported. However, streets have been cleared as a precaution.
At the time, according to the National Weather Service, winds in Manhattan were blowing at about 20 mph with gusts up to about 40 mph.
The New York City Buildings Department suspended construction work at 5 p.m. Saturday in anticipation of the storm.
Gov. Andrew Cuomo closed two key tunnels to downtown Manhattan after the city shut its mass transit system, stock exchanges, schools and Broadway and ordered hundreds of thousands of people to leave their homes ahead of Hurricane Sandy's storm surge. While light rain fell steadily and New Yorkers still bustled on the streets, Cuomo warned residents to get out of the way.
"Don't be fooled, don't look out the window and say, it doesn't look so bad," Cuomo said. "The worst is still coming."
Amtrak says it has canceled all Tuesday service in the Northeast due to high winds and heavy rain from Hurricane Sandy.
Cuomo said emergency boats were being moved downstate and the Brooklyn Battery and Holland Tunnels, both prone to flooding, would close at 2 p.m. The floor of the New York Stock Exchange was deserted in its first unplanned shutdown since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. More than 20,000 customers, mostly in Long Island, has lost power in the area by Monday morning, utility officials. Most of the city's 3,600 outages were in Brooklyn, officials said.
On Monday, crowds gathered along the South Street Seaport, until police shooed them away. In Battery Park City, a complex of high-rise offices and apartment buildings erected on a landfill in lower Manhattan, holdouts watched as the Hudson rose and began to breach sections of scenic walkways along the river.
Many people were still out jogging, walking their dogs and even taking infants out in strollers amid gusts of wind.
Mark Vial pushed a stroller holding his 2-year-old daughter Maziyar toward the door of a building where they live on 15th floor.
"We're high up enough, so I'm not worried about flooding," he said. "There's plenty of food. We'll be ok."
Vial, 35, said his building had several holdouts. "The laundry room was packed last night," he said.
Some New Yorkers packed grocery stores for water and food and scrambled to get out of flood zones, while others insisted they weren't going anywhere.
Others heeded warnings. Clutching a white pillow in her left hand and two computers in another, Alyssa Marks rushed to get to the subway before it stopped running Sunday evening. She'd gotten cash but had no time to get toiletries and water.
"I'm nervous, but I'm also excited," she said as she left her apartment in a lower Manhattan evacuation zone for a friend's place on higher ground.
Warnings about the superstorm — a predicted combination of Sandy, a wintry system moving in from the West and cold air streaming down from the Arctic — took on a much more ominous tone Sunday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's environmental protection chief, Louis Uccellini, called the projected storm surge "the worst-case scenario" for New York City, Long Island and northern New Jersey.
It threatened to swamp parts of lower Manhattan, flood subway tunnels and knock out the underground network of power, phone and high-speed Internet lines that are the lifeblood of America's financial capital.
The major American stock exchanges closed for the day, the first unplanned shutdown since the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001. The floor of the NYSE, typically bustling with traders on a Monday morning, fell within the city's mandatory evacuation zone. The United Nations canceled all meetings at its New York headquarters. New York called off school for the city's 1.1 million students.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Sunday announced a mandatory evacuation affecting 375,000 people in low-lying areas from the beaches of Queens to Battery Park City. Subways and buses were shut down Sunday night, leaving more than 5 million mostly carless daily riders on their own to get to higher ground.
Cuomo deployed National Guard troops to the city and Long Island. Consolidated Edison weighed the possibility of shutting down power in parts of lower Manhattan to protect equipment. Broadway shows were canceled for Sunday and Monday. One small hospital was being evacuated, while several others were moving patients to higher floors.
Amtrak said passenger service between Boston and Raleigh, N.C., and between the East Coast and Chicago, New Orleans and Florida will be suspended for the second day in a row.
This is the second time in 14 months that New York City has faced a scenario forecasters have long feared: a big hurricane hitting the city or a bit south, such that the cyclone's counterclockwise winds drive water into miles of densely populated shoreline.
Hurricane Irene ultimately came ashore as a tropical storm in Coney Island, with a 4-foot storm surge that washed over parts of the southern tip of Manhattan but didn't wreak the havoc that officials had feared, although it caused tremendous damage elsewhere. Some experts have said that a surge 3 feet higher could have caused huge damage.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was typically blunt: "Don't be stupid. Get out."
The storm bore down barely a week before the presidential election. Wary of being seen as putting political pursuits ahead of public safety, Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney reshuffled their campaign plans.
In Virginia, one of the most competitive states, election officials eased absentee voting requirements for those affected by the storm. Three other closely contested states, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Ohio, were within Sandy's reach. Early voting was canceled Monday in Maryland and Washington, D.C., both reliably Democratic.
After hooking inland, Sandy was expected to collide with a wintry storm moving in from the west and cold air streaming down from the Arctic. Forecasters said the combination could bring close to a foot of rain in places, a potentially lethal storm surge of 4 to 11 feet across much of the region, and punishing winds that could cause widespread power outages that last for days.
Craig Fugate, chief of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said FEMA teams were deployed from North Carolina to Maine and as far inland as West Virginia, bringing generators and basic supplies that will be needed in the storm's aftermath.
"I have not been around long enough to see a hurricane forecast with a snow advisory in it," Fugate told NBC's "Today" show.
Pennsylvania's largest utilities brought in hundreds of line-repair and tree-trimming crews. In New Jersey, where utilities were widely criticized last year for slow responses after the remnants of storms Irene and Lee, authorities promised a better performance. Hundreds of homes and businesses were already without electricity early Monday.
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