Hurricane Sandy Clean Up New York City – H 2012
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Millions of people in the northeastern US, including people who work in the media and entertainment industries, woke up Tuesday morning to gray skies and a drizzle. After one of the most destructive storms to hit the region in some time, authorities were still responding to emergencies stemming from Hurricane Sandy, surveying the damage and carefully preparing to restore service to all those without they have electricity, cable TV and other basic services of modern life.
Schools, courts and Broadway shows were canceled Tuesday. The New York Stock Exchange remains closed for a second day, marking the first time in more than 120 years that such a thing has happened. The business community was horrified when several media outlets reported that the floor of the NYSE had flooded, but the reports turned out to be inaccurate.
Some telecommunications companies, including AT&T, Comcast, Verizon and Time Warner Cable said they were trying to switch damaged systems to backup generators. AT&T said it will add capacity to its wireless network. Some websites, including Gawker and the Huffington Post, were blocked as the storm overwhelmed data servers in the region. The extent of the damage is extensive. YouTube users around the world are reporting unreliable service.
“We continue to struggle with flooding and fiber outages in central New York and Connecticut,” said a statement on the website of Datagram, which offers server hosting services to several major media companies.
Many of the cable companies would not give exact timelines for a full recovery, but they are committed to doing what they can.
According to a statement from Cablevision, “As a result of Hurricane Sandy, Cablevision is experiencing widespread outages, primarily related to the loss of power. Where conditions permit, Cablevision crews are in the field working around the clock to restore Optimum TV, phone and Internet services, in close coordination with local utilities. We will provide updates for our Optimum.net customers.”
Many entertainment and media companies are also treading carefully, keeping employees at home and trying to curtail operations in the face of power, transportation and data outages.
A representative of Sony Corp. said the company's New York offices were closed Monday and remain closed Tuesday. He said there was no word yet on Wednesday, which would depend on factors such as mass transit.
A Time Warner spokesman said the group's downtown Manhattan headquarters at Columbus Circle also remained closed Tuesday “with staff working from home.”
NBCUniversal's New York offices also remain closed “to all but key employees – news and people who keep us on the air,” a spokesperson said. All TV and movie productions in the tri-state are halted on Tuesday.
Asked about NBCUniversal's headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in midtown Manhattan, the spokesman said the building was “basically OK,” although there were reports of some broken windows.
A Viacom spokesperson said only “key network personnel are operating,” with offices closed Tuesday and no plans yet for Wednesday. Company headquarters at 1515 Broadway are fine, but company officials report no phone service.
More than 7 million people in 13 states remain without power, from the DC/Baltimore area to New Hampshire. The most pressing obstacle to normalcy is restoring power, and officials say it could take up to a week to restore the damage. In New York City and the immediate suburbs, about 650,000 people lost power, according to Con Edison, which is more than three times the number of people affected by Hurricane Irene.
“This is the largest storm-related outage in our history,” said ConEd's senior vice president of electric operations. John Miksad.
To restore power, ConEd said it will have to navigate infrastructure that was hit hard by the storm. Power lines are down across New York, hundreds of streets remain closed to all but emergency vehicles, and bringing power online means cleaning underground equipment of seawater and dealing with issues like the explosion that hit a power plant on 14th street.
“If your power is out, it will likely be out for the next several days,” the Con Ed spokesman said. Alfonso Quiroz.
Transportation in the area also remains in dire shape. Governor of New York Andrew Cuomo has only opened bridges for emergency personnel, meaning that even if commuters wanted to rush to work, there are no roads for that to happen.
As for the subways, they too have fallen as the Metropolitan Transit Authority attempts to dry out floodwater tunnels. On Tuesday morning, MTA officials gathered to discuss when bus service would be restored.
“We are assessing the extent of the damage and beginning the recovery process,” said MTA Executive Director Joseph Lotta. “In 108 years our employees have never faced a challenge like the one we are facing now.”
Georg Szalai contributed to this report.
