Hurricane Sandy Update for NYC
November 1, 2012
Around Town by Neal Tepel
Most of the MTA bus lines are operating and bus service will continue to increase. Limited subway service will return today. There certainly will not be service below 34th Street in Manhattan where there is no power. It’s unlikely that there will be service under the East River before the weekend. All the East River bridges are open. However, the Queens Midtown Tunnel, the Hugh Carey Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and the Holland Tunnels remain closed into the weekend.
The Lincoln Tunnel is open. People should use extreme caution when driving on streets, particularly where there are no traffic lights operating.The four East River bridges are restricted to High Occupancy Vehicles only coming into Manhattan – meaning 3 or more people per vehicle – all day on Thursday and all day on Friday 6 am to midnight. So from 6 am to midnight, if you’re coming into Manhattan on the one of those bridges, you have to have three people in the car.
If you’re coming into Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel, the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Triborough Bridge, or any of the four East River bridges – the Queensboro, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Brooklyn – you must have three people in the car. There are around 643,000 customers in the City remaining without power – some 230,000 of them in Manhattan. Area by area is being restored. Battery Park City never lost their power. Every building in Zone A will be tagged – red, yellow, or green, meaning green is safe to enter the building, red means it’s not safe and you may not enter the building, and yellow meaning you should exercise great caution. Several hospital facilities needed to be evacuated including NYU-Downtown, the Manhattan Veterans’ Affairs Hospital, NYU Langone, Coney Island Hospital, and Bellevue Hospital.
