NYC: My experience of Superstorm Sandy

I was fairly anxious when packing for my trip to New York City. It would be late October ... but what's the weather like there in late October? We often see films in which the snow is deep and the air is freezing, and everyone knows (from Sex and the City) that no-one stays in the sweltering city in August, opting to head to their other house in the Hamptons instead... But for October I was unsure whether to pack raincoat, hat and scarf or sunscreen... What I did not expect was a hurricane.

On the day we arrived (25th October), Hurricane Sandy hit Cuba and news reporters began to speculate that it (s/he?) would follow a path along the Eastern Seaboard of the US. Not watching the news ourselves, we began to receive texts from home saying, "It's going to get a bit windy over there - ho-ho!" - we laughed, feeling fairly safe in the knowledge that New York doesn't get hurricanes and that the storm would remain out at sea, and got on with our sightseeing, eating and drinking cocktails.

We visited the Brooklyn Fire Station on the morning of Saturday 27th October, and were chatting to the firefighters in the 'mess room' (is that a thing?) when the news came on the little TV in the corner. They asked when were were due to fly home - Monday evening (the 29th). "Ohh, you'll be goin' nowhere on Monday" they laughed (imagine this in the sort of accent that says 'cworffee' for 'coffee'). We shook our heads saying, "We'll be fine!", bid them goodbye and carried on sightseeing - off to Liberty and Ellis Island - it was notably windy on the boat I must admit:

Back on dry land, it was ever-so-slightly disconcerting to see these posters appearing in all the subway stations, but we still assumed it was the Americans being over-dramatic as usual.

May I take this opportunity to draw your attention to Knickerbocker Ave?!

The next day (Sunday 28th) was to be our last full day. We went to Ground Zero and the shops on Fifth Avenue, but became increasingly frustrated by notices on shop and cafe doors stating they'd be closing at 3pm to allow staff to get home before the subway began to shut down. At this point I think we all genuinely believed that everyone was completely over-reacting and we just had a bit of a bumpy journey in store the next evening. And then, as we were watching kids play on the giant piano from the Big movie in FAO Schwartz toy shop, we recieved a text from BA to say our flight was cancelled.

We schlepped back to the hotel and spent hours on hold to BA before finally getting through to be told that the next available flight would be Sunday 4th November - a week away! We decided to book that but to keep trying for an earlier flight. The hotel - 70 Park Avenue - staff were amazing and booked us in until the Sunday at a special 'Sandy' rate (cheaper than the already-cheap deal we had in the first place, when they could easily have profiteered - all the hotels in Lower Manhattan had been evacuated by this point and rooms were scarce), promised that if we got an earlier flight they would not charge us for the nights we didn't use and waived our telephone charges to the BA helpline in the UK. They then gave us a sheet of paper detailing the closest drugstore with an idea of the sorts of things to stock up on and a list of local bars and restaurants which were planning to stay open during the storm. There was nothing else for it but to go to the tavern across the road for some tea and cocktails!

Very undramatic view from our room at lunchtime on Monday. Note people with brollies - it really wasn't very windy.

Monday morning dawned, a bit breezy and spitting rain but nothing more. We were advised not to go far and to be back at the hotel by 1pm, so we duly went out and stocked up on candles and non-cookable food, and went back to our room.

Boredom soon ensued - thank heavens for the free wi-fi (it was about this point that I became addicted to the Sims app).

We popped down to the lobby for a change of scenery and I took some pictures from the doorway. It was raining properly by now but still nothing too dramatic.

Back up in our room the President seemed concerned

But there was still not a lot happening where we were...

Jo Skyping her baby daughter

The day drew on, the news reports from Battery Park were becoming more and more dramatic...

And our evening meal wasn't what we'd grown accustomed to...

It was actually really tasty

 It kept raining and then got dark so we could no longer see what was going on outside the window. We decided to light one of the candles we'd panic-bought, just for fun, since we were obviously not going to need them. And then bang. At 8.30 everything went off. Thank goodness we had that candle lit.

Yes, we were totally drinking wine throughout the hurricane.

I took these pictures of the blackout...

 It looks like daylight but it was dark. The light in the sky is from the rest of the city, showing just how much light pollution there is.

We were right on the edge of the blackout zone, as you can see - lit buildings are just half a block away.

After the initial excitement there was nothing else for it but to go to bed - after several days sightseeing we needed it anyway. We were convinced the power would be back on by morning. I woke up around 4am to go to the loo - and when I flushed it it did not fill back up with water. Nothing came out of the taps. THAT is when I started to really worry, thinking that something had gone wrong with the city's water system. A quick glance out the window and still it was just a bit raining and windy, but the hotel was silent. It was really quite eerie as we had no way of telling whether everyone else had evacuated or was just asleep as we had been.

Next morning there was still no electricity or water so we ventured downstairs. Obviously, the lifts weren't in use so we navigated our way from the 11th floor down the emergency stairs with the aid of a torch app and the wonderful hotel staff who stood at the entrance to the stairs on each floor, shining torches into the stairwell.

The scenes downstairs were pretty chaotic; 70 Park Ave is a pet-friendly hotel so there were dogs everywhere, adding to the general disarray. The staff had kindly gone out and managed to get coffees and pastries from somewhere for all the guests. It turned out that the water system was fine but it couldn't reach the higher floors, but the power outage was huge and they had no idea when it would be fixed. The staff arranged a room for us at another hotel, we climbed back up the 11 flights of stairs and then back down again in the dark with all our bags. 

 Sandbags on Times Square

Off in a taxi to the other hotel, we stood in an enormous queue only to be told at reception that they could only accommodate us until Wednesday as it was the New York Marathon the following weekend and they were fully booked. The phones were down so all we could do was get back in a taxi to the original hotel and beg for their help - by the time we got there, all the guests had now left leaving only the staff who'd been awake all night.We were finally allocated a room in their sister hotel on Times Square for the full week, again on condition that we could leave early without penalty if we managed to get an earlier flight. While this was being arranged the staff invited us to join them for pizza and take-out and then one of the porters very kindly drove us across town to the new hotel in his own car. He was from the Bronx and had managed to nip home for half an hour to check his wife and kids were OK before returning to work - what a star.

We made the most of our extra time on our once-in-a-lifetime trip - no point in moping about after all, even for J who had been anxious about leaving her 18 month old daughter for 5 nights in the first place and now wasn't seeing her for 12. Even though the public transport was still very patchy and a lot of places were closed as they had no power, and Central Park was closed due to unstable trees, we did manage to fit in a few extra museums and *ahem* quite a few extra shops.

We also stumbled across the collapsed crane on top of a residential development in Midtown.

Sadly, the Halloween Parade and New York Marathon, two bonus things I was hoping to see since we'd now be there that week, were cancelled. More disappointing though for all the runners who'd trained for months and travelled from far and wide.

We never did manage to get an earlier flight, in fact we'd been lucky that we hadn't got a replacement flight on the Tuesday or Wednesday because they were still grounded then and we'd have had to wait even longer for a second replacement. The power still had not been reconnected to Midtown by the time we left.

I remained very blasé about the whole experience - for us it really had just be a bit of wind and rain and a power cut - until I watched the BBC documentary Sandy: Anatomy of a Superstorm a few weeks later and saw just how bad the devastation was along the coast. It's surreal to think that all of that was happening just a few miles away - we were really lucky only to be affected in the way we were. And it's something to tell the grandkids isn't it?

Times Square