After the storm

Eventually I get kicked out of the Hyatt, but after managing to remain there most of the day. I head over to my friend's girlfriends. She lives up on 55^th street which was not affected by the power cuts. We hand-make pizza for dinner that night (and for the following night) and I end up staying there 2 nights and a whole day. I'm very grateful! On Thursday morning I cab it downtown to get my stuff from the other apartment and then head to the bus station to get back to Newark airport for the flight back to Beijing. Airports mostly opened up again on Wednesday so a Thursday flight is good timing.

Although the subway began to come back to life again, it's still out all of downtown where there parts of it are still flooded and there is no electricity. The BSR office remains closed and without electricity, so my 3 days of work were not as productive as intended to be, and some meetings had to be cancelled, but we made do using skype. Without electricity downtown is strange. The traffic lights are all out of course, and there are no lights on in any shops or restaurants. Most of which are closed but a few shops remain open, taking cash, and selling non-perishable goods. I'm not sure how many people are still living downtown, as most probably did as I did and tried to stay elsewhere. So it's certainly a ghost town down there. And down near the tip, the stock exchange has re-opened, with a power generator to keep it going. I'm not sure who managed to get down there or work there, but it's symbolic at least. Power may return at the end of the week or weekend and then Manhattan will be back to normal (depending on how long it takes to clean the water out of the subways).

In reality the storm did not hit Manhattan that badly—a few trees down, lots of leaves around and so on. Some other areas in New Jersey, or in the New York suburbs were worse hit with some trees collapsing and plenty of flooding from the ocean and rivers (mostly, rather than rain).  At least 70 people died across the US and several million are suffering without power (and for those in high-rises, no water either) which surely has an economic impact. The major problems in Manhattan tended to be at the hospitals where my roommates were all working, so I was somewhat exposed to them, or at least I heard first-hand accounts.

On the Monday when the storm hit, Rachel was working at Tisch hospital , one of two major hospitals right on the east coast of Manhattan and highly vulnerable to flooding. And flood it did. The hospital was also affected by the power cuts, being below 39^th where the power was cut by the power company. The hospital had to use its backup diesel generator to keep priority things running, but that began to fail after a few hours and they had to evacuate the building around 3am. Rachel's story was not pleasant and she said it was worse than in New Orleans, where she was when Katrina hit. At Tisch they had to carry patients down 15 flights of stairs in the dark; sometimes having to balance IV drips. Machines that were in some cases necessary to keep patients alive (for example 20 babies who were born premature) had to switch to battery power but that did not last long and doctors were desperately sitting there, in the dark, calling any hospital they knew and trying to find room for the babies and other patients.  It was pretty chaotic and not pleasant. Even some of the ambulance drivers got lost trying to drive the patients to other hospitals because many additional emergency personnel were from out-of-state and drafted in to help. She got back about 5.30am and collapsed into bed.

Bellevue hospital, next to Tisch, but bigger, with over 700 patients including some which are criminals (and thus on a special floor with protection) had also been running in its backup generator. But the generator was on the top floor and the fuel was downstairs, so apparently up to 200 people, mostly, thankfully, National Guard had to form a chain in the stairwell and spend all day moving diesel upstairs. Meanwhile they began to evacuate the most serious patients. By Wednesday they began to experience problems with their generator too and so a full mass evacuation began. This time in the daytime and better organized compared to that at Tisch (which was happening during the storm) and hundreds of ambulances were on standby. Still, Lucy reported it would take a good two days to complete the evacuation and the hospital was not much fun whilst it was happening, since the toilets weren't flushing and all sorts. The hospital had better learn some lessons about preparing for these kinds of events. To have unreliable generators and no backup plans is embarrassing.

All three of my friends were thus pretty heavily involved, and playing their bit. They were more severely affected than most, but then I also hear the hospital is pretty crazy on a normal day too! Of course the media went crazy over the storm, and it clearly affected many people. On the broad scale of things though, there was good preparation and the storm was not too serious. I imagine that more lives might have been lost on a normal day from car accidents or crime—during the storm there was much less driving and crime taking place! It is still a tragedy of course, but on reflection it's clear that developed countries that are well prepared and with decent infrastructure do pretty well compared to developing countries. The Caribbean was much worse hit by the storm.

And amongst it all politics continued, though adapted. Hopefully it will have helped Obama. And Halloween was cancelled. Well the big street party Wednesday night was, and will be moved to next week, which is a shame. At the girlfriend's apartment, we did get to meet several groups of kids trick-and-treating; some usual costumes like cats and some more unusual like aliens, and some more imaginative like Sherlock Holmes. We had prepared a lot of chocolate, but did not give out much! I imagine there might be more Halloween parties at the weekend, once electricity returns. And maybe people will be dressed up like Sandy.