New York City Area Avoids Serious Damage as Irene Weakens on Path to North
New York evita serios danios debido a que Irene se debilito en su paso al norte.
Los residentes de NYC regresaron a als calles de Manhattan, los taxis amarillos trabajaron sus rutas normales y el stock market tiene planeado abrir maniana despues que Irene paso convertida en una tormenta tropical, menos severa que el huracan que se esperaba.
Aunque no habra transporte publico hasta maniana en la tarde, los aeropuertos probablemente no funciones hasta el Martes, los puentes y tunes y los mayores vias expresas estan abiertas/ Mas de 1.7 millones han perdido energia debido a Irene y partes de New York y New Jersey estan inundadas.
No hubo un solo muerto en New York, Irene cobro 17 vidas en los otros estados.
New York City Area Avoids Serious Damage as Irene Weakens on Path to North
By Henry Goldman and Matt Townsend - Aug 28, 2011 5:44 PM ET .
New York City residents returned to Manhattan streets, yellow taxis began plying their usual routes and equity markets planned to open tomorrow after Irene passed through as a tropical storm, less severe than the hurricane local officials feared.
While subways and buses may not be restored to full service until late tomorrow, and airports may not return to full operations until the day after that, bridges and tunnels and major highways that had closed in high winds are open. More than 1.7 million lost power as the storm swept through New York and New Jersey, parts of which remained flooded.
In the city, water closed some highways, such as the Belt Parkway along the south Brooklyn shore. Metro-North commuter trains that link Manhattan with suburbs in Westchester and Connecticut will be out indefinitely due to track damage, according to Marjorie Anders, Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokeswoman.
“The good news is the worst is over and we will soon move to restore-and-return mode,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a news conference today at the New York Police Department’s lower Manhattan headquarters.
Going Back Home
In Manhattan’s Battery Park City, where shallow water flooded part of its Hudson River promenade, residents who had been told to evacuate enjoyed views of a clearing harbor. Bloomberg lifted the order at 3 p.m.
People disregarded police tape blocking Central Park entrances to run and bike, evading blown leaves and small branches littering the roadway.
“It was just a big non-event,” Rob Kuchar, 28, a UBS banker, said while strolling the Hudson River waterfront about 1:45 p.m. “It was interesting to walk around the city and not see anybody but at the end of the day, there were just some trees down and some rain.”
The storm, the first to prompt hurricane warnings in New York since 1985, made landfall in North Carolina yesterday and killed at least 18 on the East Coast. It left almost 6 million homes and businesses without power, according to the U.S. Energy Department. Damage will cost insurers about $3 billion, according to Kinetic Analysis Corp., a firm that predicts the effects of disasters.
Water in Jersey
Among the dead was a 20-year-old woman in Pilesgrove, New Jersey, 35 miles (56 kilometers) southeast of Philadelphia, who police said got swept away in her car after calling for help.
The storm flooded homes across New Jersey’s Atlantic, Salem, Somerset, Union, Bergen, Essex and Passaic Counties, and left more than 800,000 homes without electricity, the U.S. Department of Energy reported.
In Newark, police reported at least 15 rescues as water coursed through some streets. Of 50 trees the storm knocked down in the city, six took power lines down with them, Newark Mayor Cory Booker said.
By 4 p.m., New Jersey Manufacturers Insurance, the state’s third-largest home owners insurer, with 220,000 homes, had already received more than 2,500 claims for storm-related damage, Patrick Breslin, a spokesman, said in a statement. The company didn’t give an estimate of the damage.
A weakened Irene continued to New England, where Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island bore the brunt of the storm. Residents in coastal communities evacuated and hundreds of thousands lost power.
Connecticut Death
In Prospect, Connecticut, an unidentified woman in her 90s died and her husband was critically injured in a house fire caused by a tree limb falling on electrical wires, said Lieutenant P.J. Conway, a Fire Department spokesman.
New York City escaped without a fatality or major injury, Bloomberg said. Officials “made exactly the right call” when the MTA shut down subways, buses and regional commuter trains before the storm, he said.
While “it will be annoying tomorrow” as the MTA returns the system to running condition, the mayor said he expected most operations to return by Tuesday, Aug. 30.
“Our No. 1 priority is protecting people,” he said. “When there is a real threat, we are going to err on the side of taking precautions.”
New York’s mayor is the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP.
Consolidated Edison Inc. (ED), New York’s power supplier, said the storm “lightly affected” Manhattan, allowing the utility to scrap a plan to shut down power to thousands of lower Manhattan customers out of concern for underground cables that could short out if flooded by a storm surge. More than 936,000 New York state residents lost electricity, Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office said.
Beer Flows Again
Signs of returning normality included the reopening of New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway at 1 p.m.; the opening of the Holland Tunnel, which had been partially closed due to flooding, and the reopening of New York City’s spans over the Hudson and East Rivers. Atlantic City casinos will be open tomorrow morning, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said.
U.S. equity markets said they will open as usual. NYSE Euronext, Nasdaq OMX Group, Bats and Direct Edge Holdings LLC said they will open their U.S. venues, according to e-mailed statements.
City officials in Hoboken, New Jersey, told George Palermo, owner of S. Sullivan’s Bar and Grill on Washington Street, that he could reopen around 11:15 a.m., he said in an interview. By 1:30 p.m. seats at the bar and outside tables were full, music was blasting and cars were passing by in the city of about 50,000 across from Manhattan.
To contact the reporters on this story: Henry Goldman in New York at
hgoldman@bloomberg.net; Matt Townsend in New York at
mtownsend9@bloomberg.net To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Tannenbaum
Publicado: Dom Ago 28, 2011 5:17 pm