LaGuardia Airport is set to reopen tomorrow at 7 AM! Both runways! Looks like I may make it to World Fantasy after all! Keep those fingers crossed!
Feeling cooped up too long, Alexa and I ventured outside earlier this afternoon. The weather was quite mild. We saw others in our neighborhood venturing out, too. To our surprise, we found the local supermarket and green grocer open. But mostly what we found was storm damage. Nothing too terrible, luckily. Considering the magnitude of the “superstorm” it could have been much, much worse. Click on the photos for larger, more detailed images. (Also, these are the first photos I’ve taken with my new smartphone! Yay!)
In Brower Park, we found several downed trees.
Our local Parks Department gardener, John, was already there, trimming fallen branches. He’s amazing. I didn’t expect to see anyone from the Park Department there already. He also pointed out a visitor to Brooklyn: a hawk who had stopped in the area during his migration! (He’s hard to see in the small version of the picture below, but if you click on it for a larger view, he’s right there in the middle of the shot, perched on the branch.)
There were several downed trees on the streets, too.
This tree fell on a car on Kingston Avenue!
And here’s that same tree’s uprooted base, paving stones and all.
As I said, it could have been a lot worse. We definitely got lucky. For more photos from our damage-strewn adventure, check out Flickr.
We seem to have made it through the worst of Hurricane Sandy. We still have water and, unlike most of lower Manhattan, power. No flooding, either. Crown Heights is high ground, as the name implies, and all our power lines and transformers are underground. Thank you, Crown Heights!
We filled our bathtub with water just in case there was an outage. This morning, Olympia either jumped into the tub, unaware it was full, or fell into it because of her balance issues. Either way, it was quite the ruckus, and suddenly there was a wet kitty trail leading from the bathroom to under the bed.
On 14th street in Manhattan, an electrical transformer exploded. I’m guessing it got hit with storm surge. Bridges and tunnels are still closed all over New York City. There were 100 mph wind gusts recorded on some of the bridges, and the tunnels are flooded. Public transportation is still offline. Because of flooding, last I heard was that it may take up to four days to clear the subway tunnels and get the trains running again. The fact that the water is brackish has made the subway flooding more damaging. Buses should be up and running sooner.
The New York Times has an amazing slide show of Hurricane Sandy’s damage to NYC and beyond.
In good symbolic news, the flag on top of the school building we can see from our apartment is still there. It’s holding on by a thread, but it’s holding on.
