Tracking the Storm

At his briefing Tuesday morning, Gov. Chris Christie sounded tired but determined, wearing his navy-colored “Chris Christie” pullover. He is planning to go on an aerial tour of the damage this afternoon.

Overview:

• Tidal flooding is widespread.
• All power in Jersey City is out; all power in Newark is out from the tidal surge.
• National Guard is helping in Jersey City with evacuations.
• 450 high-water vehicles and helicopters from the National Guard have been deployed statewide.
• 5,500 residents statewide are in shelters.
• An additional 2,000-person shelter is being opened at Rutgers.
• Salvation Army and FEMA are distributing food statewide.
• 2.4 million New Jersey households are without power: “This is twice the number as Hurricane Irene,” Mr. Christie said. 1.2 million of those are PSE&G (in the Newark and Jersey City areas.) “Hurricane Irene took eight days to restore, this may take longer,” the governor said.
• Avoid travel unless absolutely necessary. Private employers: “Unless you can identify a safe route for employees to get to work, I’d ask you to let them stay home today.”
• Garden State Parkway is open. The turnpike is open from Exits 1 to 10.
• 24 small rail cars were moved by the tidal surge onto the elevated roadway on the New Jersey turnpike, northbound side, around Exit 12. Cranes are working to remove these railcars.
• New Jersey Transit is assessing the system. There is major damage on “each and every one of New Jersey’s rail lines.” Large sections are washed out on the coast, large trees are on rails across the state, and several rail bridges are damaged.
• Drinking water: There are 10 facilities with minor or major problems, but there is not yet a risk to public health.
• Health care facilities. 29 hospitals lost power, plus additional facilities. Many have generator power.

— SHARON OTTERMAN

The New York City subway system, hit by unprecedented damage from the storm, will remain closed for “a good four or five days,” and schools will be closed again on Wednesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Tuesday morning.

The mayor said, however, that he hoped some bus service would be restored by Tuesday afternoon, and that he hoped to announce full restoration of bus service by Wednesday.

Other highlights from the mayor’s 11 a.m. briefing:

Death toll: Now stands at 10

Breezy Point fires: The blazes that destroyed more than 80 homes overnight in the Rockaways are finally under control. “It looked like a forest fire out in the Midwest,” the mayor said.

Other fires: At least 23 major fires elsewhere in the city.

Tap water: Safe to drink, but heavily chlorinated so it will taste different.

Group cabs: An executive order was signed, allowing yellow cabs to pick up multiple passengers at multiple points, and allowing livery cars to pick up street hails.

Power: At least 750,000 New York City residents are without power, including residents of 59 public-housing buildings.

Shelters: More than 6,100 people are now at 76 shelters.

Airports: Closed.

Causes of storm fatalities: “A whole variety of causes,” the mayor said. “Someone was in their house in their bed and a tree fell on him and killed him. Someone stepped in a puddle where there was an electric wire. We had a couple of bodies in someone’s house, I’m not sure what the story is there.”

Dangling crane: It is stable but can’t be fully secured till the winds die down. “The procedure will be to get the boom and strap it to the building, then we can reopen the streets,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

— ANDY NEWMAN

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York on Tuesday raised the possibility of building a levee in New York in the aftermath of major flooding in Lower Manhattan and other parts of the city.

“It is something we’re going to have to start thinking about,” Mr. Cuomo said. “The construction of this city did not anticipate these kinds of situations. We are only a few feet above sea level. The flooding in downtown Manhattan was really extraordinary and unlike anything I had seen.”

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

In Breezy Point, in the Rockaways in Queens, at least 50 tightly packed homes in the beach community were destroyed overnight.

The New York Police Department confirmed on Tuesday that there had been nine storm-related deaths in New York City and said that number was expected to rise. No further details were available.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

The city expected the Manhattan, Brooklyn, Williamsburg and Ed Koch Queensboro Bridges to reopen shortly on Tuesday morning, an official said.

Earlier on Tuesday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said the Tappan Zee Bridge had been reopened.

The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and Queens-Midtown Tunnel remain closed, according to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the tunnels. The Lincoln Tunnel has been open throughout the storm.

On Monday, the governor closed many of the area’s major bridges, including the George Washington, Verrazano-Narrows, Whitestone and Throgs Neck Bridges.

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Much of Manhattan below Midtown could be without electricity for several days after an explosion at a substation on the East River on Monday night, a spokesman for Consolidated Edison said Tuesday morning.

More than 240,000 customers – and many more people – were without power more than 12 hours after the explosion that looked spectacular but did not injure any of about a dozen utility workers who were at the site at the east end of 14th Street. Each customer could represent a household or even an entire apartment building.

The blast knocked out electricity for all of Manhattan below 39th Street on the east side and 31st Street on the west side – with the exception of a few pockets, including Battery Park City.

In the two hours before the explosion, Con Edison officials purposefully turned off all power to two small sections of the financial district in Lower Manhattan and in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn. Power to those areas could be restored in three or four days after utility crews pump out floodwater and dry and repair equipment below ground, said Bob McGee, a spokesman for Con Edison. But he said it may take longer to restore power to customers whose service was interrupted by the explosion.

John Miksad, the company’s senior vice president for electric operations, said, “This is the largest storm-related outage in our history.”

Con Edison officials believed the explosion was caused by water flooding the substation but had not ruled out flying debris, the spokesman said.

— PATRICK MCGEEHAN

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg addressed New Yorkers in a news conference this morning.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, suggested that New Yorkers should expect their mass transit to return “in pieces and parts” in the days to come.

“We’re going to try to be creative,” Mr. Lhota said in an interview with WNYC. “Those portions of the system that can be up and running, I want them up and running as quickly as possible.”

He added, “If there’s a portion of the system that’s going to take longer to repair, that doesn’t mean the whole system is down.”

He suggested, for instance, that buses could be rerouted to complement the mass transit services that are available.

Mr. Lhota declined to give a timetable for restoring service, saying that to do so would be “a scientific wild guess on my part.” He said the authority could provide a more substantial update later in the day Tuesday, as the sunlight allowed crews to assess the system more thoroughly.

But it was already clear that significant damage had been done. “Our electrical systems, our alarm systems, tell us when there’s water down there,” Mr. Lhota told WNYC. “They basically shut off. It’s an automatic system that saves the electricity and doesn’t cause problems. And they all shut off in relatively quick fashion. They would only shut off if there was water down there.”

While seven subway tunnels were flooded beneath the East River, Mr. Lhota has emphasized that the damage was not confined to the Lower Manhattan area. On the Metro-North Railroad’s Hudson line, power was lost from 59th Street to Croton-Harmon. On the New Haven line, it was lost through New Haven. The Long Island Rail Road evacuated its West Side Yards, and one East River tunnel flooded.

The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel flooded end to end, and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel took on water as well.

Mr. Lhota told WNYC he had just sent a text message to Patrick J. Foye, the executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, in hopes of determining how and when the agencies could open bridges and tunnels.

“The tunnels, if they’re dry, the assessment can be relatively straightforward,” Mr. Lhota said. “The bridges, given the extent of the wind, we’re going to need a couple hours having the engineers assess that there’s no damage to any of the bridges.”

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Not all of the Atlantic City boardwalk survived. This is from the northern end of the city. #Sandy twitter.com/thomaskaplan/s…
— Thomas Kaplan (@thomaskaplan) October 30, 2012

Search-and-rescue missions were combing Atlantic City on Tuesday morning as floodwaters receded.

Much of the city, particularly inland from the shore, appeared to have survived without great damage, at least from an initial survey of the main commercial district.

Around the city, planters, newspaper boxes and garbage cans had been tossed around. Many neighborhoods did not have power, and it remained quite windy. But the waist-high floodwaters that surged through the streets on Monday had largely receded. Most buildings remained intact, and most roads were passable.

The high-rise casinos that line the Boardwalk appeared largely unscathed. Near the Trump Taj Mahal, an overhead traffic light had crashed down into the road, but the slot machines inside the casino remained illuminated, ready for gamblers. By Bally’s, some fencing on the beach had toppled, but the Boardwalk was intact.

Some of the most visible damage was in the city’s northern section, where an older stretch of the Boardwalk had washed away on Monday as Hurricane Sandy approached. By Tuesday, the storm had left little more than a tangle of timber planks and bits of concrete. Some bits of the Boardwalk had washed as far as a quarter of a mile inland.

The city still felt like a ghost town, with storefronts covered in plywood and many traffic lights not working, but there were a few signs of life. One restaurant, the Tun Tavern, remained open Monday night, running out of pumpkin ale but otherwise nourishing dozens of people who were hunkered down at a hotel.

And although a 20-foot red awning for a pizza shop lay across the street nearby, the 24/7 Food Market on Atlantic Avenue had ample hot coffee on Tuesday morning.

One of its owners, Faheem Tariq, said the store had about 20 customers over the course of the storm. “We’ve been open the whole time,” he said.

— THOMAS KAPLAN AND JON HURDLE

At least 14 deaths have been confirmed or are being investigated as related to the storm over the past 48 hours, the authorities said.

In Connecticut, a 90-year-old woman and a firefighter were killed in separate incidents, the first confirmed casualties in the state since Hurricane Sandy struck the Northeast region, the state police said.

In Maryland, the deaths of three adults were confirmed to be related to the storm, in traffic- or vehicle-related accidents or after a tree fell on a house, a medical official there said.

And in West Virginia, a 40-year-old woman was killed when her vehicle was in an accident in snowy weather conditions, an emergency official confirmed.

In North Carolina, a man was killed when his vehicle hit a tree that was crashing down in Surry County, said  an official with the state emergency offices.

Officials in Pennsylvania said two deaths — a boy in Susquehanna County and a 62-year-old man in Berks County — were being investigated but that the county coroner had not yet confirmed them as related to the storm.

In New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office said late Monday night that at least five deaths in the state were caused by the storm.

A New York City emergency management official said more deaths were being investigated as related to the storm, but no determination had been officially made by the medical examiner.

In New York City, where three people had been reported dead, rescuers have found a fourth person dead, inside a home in Midland Beach on Staten Island on Tuesday, The Staten Island Advance reported.

In Virginia, there were no confirmed storm-related deaths.

— CHRISTINE HAUSER

Atlantic City’s mayor, Lorenzo Langford, struck back at Gov. Chris Christie on Tuesday after the governor accused him of encouraging the city’s residents to defy his evacuation order and called him a “rogue mayor.”

“The governor is either misinformed or ill advised or just deciding to prevaricate,” Mr. Langford said Tuesday on the “Today” show on NBC. “Isn’t it sad that here we are in the throes of a major catastrophe and the governor tries to play politics?”

Mr. Christie said Monday that he had heard that Mr. Langford had told the city’s residents they could ride out the storm at home or in a school a block from the ocean.

Mr. Langford said: “That is absolutely false and the governor needs to be challenged. He is dead wrong.”

The mayor said what happened was the city had a contingency plan in place for those who did not heed the warning to evacuate.

“It’s better to have options and not need them than to need options and not have them,” Mr. Langford said. “Fortunately, most of our residents did heed our warnings to flee the city.”

Mr. Langford did not seem inclined to let the matter rest there. “I would love nothing better than that than to confront the governor mano-a-mano,” he said.

— ANDY NEWMAN

Officials were out before dawn in Montauk on Tuesday, roving in pickup trucks and S.U.V.’s, trying to get a grasp on the damage the coming light of day would reveal. On the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, just south of Main Street, South Emerson Avenue was strewed with flotsam, clumps of seaweed and deep with sand swept along when the sea had breached several sand levees along the avenue at the height of the storm.

That was just one snapshot of the damage caused by the potent storm, which knocked out power to more than 900,000 customers on Long Island, according to officials. Many roads were impassible as a result of downed tree limbs and the threat from fallen electrical wires.

On the north side of Montauk Village, along the Long Island Sound, roads were flooded and sand dunes wiped out, commercial fishing ships in Montauk Harbor were battered and the popular waterside restaurants filled with water.

“It’s by far been the worst on the North Side that I’ve ever seen in my life,” Bill Wilkinson, the East Hampton town supervisor, said Tuesday just before sunrise in Montauk. More than 175 people spent the night in a shelter in East Hampton, which will be open for a second night on Tuesday.

On Monday night, seawater began to pour over the Napeague Stretch, cutting off Montauk from the mainland. Teams worked to excavate the dunes, and redeposit the sand as a levee against the ocean, said, Stephen Lynch, the East Hampton town highway superintendent. “I haven’t seen that since I was in sixth grade,” he said.

On Cooper Lane in East Hampton on Monday, a giant tree uprooted, slamming down into the house next to it, crushing the roof. “There’s a lot of wind damage; trees are snapped and broken down,” said Richard Webb, the town’s maintenance crew leader.

At the Gurney’s Inn, on Old Montauk Highway, the early light of Tuesday morning revealed the decimation of the beach club restaurant, the Beach Barge, which guests at the bar on Monday night had watched slowly disintegrate, battered by waves. The restaurant, which had recently been renovated following damage from Tropical Storm Irene, was shattered, the boardwalk outside gone and the restaurant tipped on its side and partly washed away.

“They love the Barge, the people that stay here,” said Nancy Miller, the front desk supervisor. “It’s very sad to see that thing go.”

— SARAH MASLIN NIR

More than 5,700 flights have been canceled on Tuesday, bringing the total number of cancellations caused by the storm to 15,500, according to FlightStats.com. That surpasses the disruptions from Hurricane Irene, which caused 14,000 flight cancellations in August 2011.

The three major New York airports remained closed Tuesday morning. Airlines hope to resume service to and from New York by Wednesday afternoon. Travel experts say it could take several days, or even into next week, for passengers to be rebooked.

— CHRISTOPHER DREW

The power failures that plunged much of Lower Manhattan into darkness appeared to stop halfway across the East River on the Williamsburg Bridge.

The above photo, submitted by a reader and taken from Williamsburg on Monday evening, showed a stark dividing line between areas where residents shuffled about with candles and flashlights late into the night and early Tuesday morning, and neighborhoods where the bulbs still burned.

A similar electrical line in the sand could also be found on the Brooklyn Bridge, according to live images broadcast on NY1 news overnight.

— J. DAVID GOODMAN

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey appeared on a half-dozen morning talk shows on Tuesday to outline the difficulties his state still faced in the aftermath of the storm.

There were 2.4 million without power in the state, a “devastated Jersey Shore,” “almost no power in the city of Newark” and many people stranded in areas where waters breached protective barriers.

He said the cost to the state was, at the moment, “incalculable.”

“We are in the midst of urban search and rescue,” he said on CNN, describing the situation in the borough of Moonachie in Bergen County as tidal floodwaters overwhelmed a natural berm.

Hundreds had been rescued so far in the area, he said, but the search continued in an area where high waters threatened residents of trailer parks who had clambered to the roofs and awaited rescue. “Those are the folks that were most in danger,” Mr. Christie said, adding that those living on higher ground or in two-story homes could get to higher ground.

He also spoke of the situation in Atlantic City, sharply criticizing Mayor Lorenzo Langford for sending “a mixed message” to residents by telling them they could safely stay in the city after Mr. Christie had ordered an evacuation.

“That was the wrong thing to do,” he said, and now “urban search and rescue” was continuing in the city on Tuesday morning.

On a subsequent appearance on the Fox News Channel, Mr. Christie was asked whether he had plans to tour storm-ravaged areas of the state with Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for president who is supported by Mr. Christie.

“I have a job to do that much bigger then presidential politics,” he said, taking time on each show to mention three calls he had with the president. “If you think right now that I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.”

— J. DAVID GOODMAN

There appeared to be no reopenings of major crossings Tuesday morning, as officials said they had not yet been able to inspect roadways and assess the damage wrought by the storm. The Lincoln Tunnel, operated by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, remained open, as it had been throughout the day on Monday, but the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel had flooded end to end. The Queens-Midtown Tunnel also took on water, the authority said.

For the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel, workers would have to “wait until water goes down enough where they can pump out the rest,” said Judie Glave, a spokesman for the authority. She added that flooding was not nearly as substantial at the Queens-Midtown Tunnel.

On Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo ordered that many of the area’s major bridges close, including the George Washington, Verrazano-Narrows, Whitestone and Throgs Neck Bridges. The city also shut down its East River crossings like the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges.

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Gov. Dannel P. Malloy of Connecticut said that two people were missing on Tuesday morning, in addition to the one firefighter and one civilian who died in the storm on Monday. He announced that the travel ban on the state’s highways has been lifted. “Right now, my attention is 100 percent focused on getting people’s lives back on track,” the governor said.

— ANDY NEWMAN

President Obama declared a federal disaster area in New York City, Long Island and eight counties in New Jersey on Tuesday. The declaration makes federal money available to people in the area.

The affected New Jersey counties are Atlantic, Cape May, Essex, Hudson, Middlesex, Monmouth, Ocean and Union.

— ANDY NEWMAN

In Battery Park before dawn, a darkness unseen since the New York City blackout of 2003 painted every high-rise building the color of a deep bruise. Even 1 World Trade Center was just a black monolith, without even an aircraft-warning light on the top.

“It’s like a ghost town,” said Melvin Allen, a maintenance worker who was stranded. “Darkness everywhere.”

In most parts of Lower Manhattan, the only lights were the flashing red-and-blue strobes on police cars acting as roadblocks.

On West Street, the traffic artery for the area, a torrent of floodwater rushed north late Monday, flooding north past 1 World Trade Center, and poured down into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Everyone in the area was marooned for the night on an island within an island, and many residents tried to drive away, only to find each route blocked by water.

— NATE SCHWEBER

Early on Tuesday morning, the former Hurricane Sandy continued to spin westward through southern Pennsylvania, the National Hurricane Center said, packing still-ferocious winds with a maximum sustained speed of 65 m.p.h. and gale-force winds from Virginia to New England.

At 5 a.m., the storm — now known to meteorologists as a post-tropical cyclone — was roughly 90 miles west of Philadelphia and was expected to take a turn north later on Tuesday. It would then pass through New York State on its way to Canada, crossing the border sometime on Wednesday, the hurricane center said.

The storm, while steadily weakening, could still cause coastal surges that, when combined with the next high tide on Tuesday, could cause some flooding, the center said.

— J. DAVID GOODMAN

A six-alarm fire that has engulfed several entire blocks of houses in the Queens beach community of Breezy Point in the Rockaways was still burning out of control on Tuesday morning, the Fire Department said. Firefighters were hampered by high winds and the lack of available water.

“Once we get there it’s hard to begin fighting it,” a spokesman, Firefighter Danny Glover, said.

“The wind is pushing it from house to house; that’s a big factor,” he said. “Another big factor is the difficulty of gaining access to viable water sources.” Seawater cannot be used in firefighting equipment, he added.

Fire officials did not know if there were people injured in the Breezy Point fires.

But three deaths were recorded elsewhere in the city on Monday night:

— A tidal surge in Tottenville at the bottom of Staten Island caused the collapse of four homes on Yetman Avenue and killed one person.

— A woman on 105th Avenue and 134th Street in Queens was electrocuted in her home.

— A man in East Flushing, Queens was killed when a tree fell on his house.

— ANDY NEWMAN

Of the more than six million American homes that are waking up to darkness on Tuesday, more than 1.9 million of them are in New York, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Twitter, the largest numbers of them in Long Island and New York City.

#NYS #outages 6am: Cent Hudson82,489 Con Ed647,988 LIPA 932,836 Natl Grid20,935 NYSEG 106,013 Orange+Rockland 130,024 RG+E 23,287
— Andrew Cuomo (@NYGovCuomo) October 30, 2012

In New York City and Westchester County, where more than 670,000 Consolidated Edison customers, some of them large buildings with hundreds of residents, were dark Tuesday morning, a spokeswoman for the company, D. Joy Faber, said it would take days to restore power.

In Manhattan, Ms. Faber said, where pre-emptive power shutdowns by the utility to to keep floodwater from hitting live equipment account for a large number of the 230,000 customers without power, “we could see some restoration within three or four days,” Ms. Faber said.

“Tidal surge caused considerable damage to equipment,” she said, and assessments need to be done.

“In other areas,” Ms. Faber added, “particularly for Westchester and Staten Island, we’ve got larger things that are going to hamper our restoration efforts,” including closed roads and the fact the utility has to wait until winds die down to send crews up to fix wires and poles.

— ANDY NEWMAN

Hundreds of people were being evacuated early on Tuesday from Moonachie, N.J., after a wall of water swept over the New Jersey Turnpike and into the Bergen County town, according to published reports. Residents of a trailer park were on the roofs of their trailers awaiting a rescue, officials said.

No one had been reported killed or injured. People are being evacuated by boat and by high-water vehicles.

Moonachie, a town of about 2,700 residents, lies along the Hackensack River.

 

 

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

A huge fire in the Breezy Point section of the Rockaways in Queens spread further during the early morning hours of Tuesday, destroying more than 50 homes and drawing nearly 200 firefighters attempting to quell the blaze.

The Fire Department upgraded the fire to a six-alarm around 3:30 a.m. and said it had not yet been contained.

Video from the scene posted by NBC News showed homes in the beach community flattened by the flames.

— J. DAVID GOODMAN

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority said early on Tuesday that the storm was the worst disaster in the history of the New York City subway system.

“The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night,” said Joseph J. Lhota, the authority’s chairman, in a statement. “All of us at the M.T.A. are committed to restoring the system as quickly as we can to help bring New York back to normal.”

He outlined the extent of the damage that city workers and residents would face in the coming days:

As of last night, seven subway tunnels under the East River flooded. Metro-North Railroad lost power from 59th Street to Croton-Harmon on the Hudson Line and to New Haven on the New Haven Line.

The Long Island Rail Road evacuated its West Side Yards and suffered flooding in one East River tunnel.

The Hugh L. Carey Tunnel is flooded from end to end and the Queens-Midtown Tunnel also took on water and was closed. Six bus garages were disabled by high water.

Asked when New Yorkers could expect the transit system to be back up and running, a spokesman for the authority, Aaron Donovan, said in a television interview that there was “no firm timeline.”

— J. DAVID GOODMAN

A backup power system failed at one of the New York City’s premier medical centers on Monday night, forcing the evacuation of all patients to nearby hospitals amid the storm’s strong gusts, officials said.

The medical center, NYU Langone, began transporting all 215 patients at the hospital to other facilities on Monday evening. Read more

— J. DAVID GOODMAN AND COLIN MOYNIHAN

More than 140 firefighters were battling a three-alarm fire that broke out just after 11 p.m. on Monday in Breezy Point, Queens, a small beach community in the Rockaways that has experienced severe flooding from the storm.

“It’s a huge fire — a lot of houses involved,” said Firefighter Michael Parrella, a spokesman for the department, adding that the area was “probably the most flooded part of the city so there are all sorts of complications.”

The fire, which affected a number of tightly packed homes, was not yet under control early Tuesday morning, he said.

— J. DAVID GOODMAN

At least 660,000 people in New York had lost power as of late Monday night, the result of a higher than normal storm surge, a planned power shut-down and an explosion at a substation in Manhattan, John Miksad, a senior vice-president at Consolidated Edison said in a news briefing.

The explosion occurred on Monday evening at a substation in the vicinity of 14th Street and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, Mr. Miksad said. The precise cause of the blast was unknown, but Mr. Miksad said floodwaters or flying debris could have been involved. It knocked out power to about 250,000 people, he said.

A video of the explosion showed a large fireball light up the New York skyline on the East Side.

Con Edison intentionally cut power to tens of thousands of people in an effort to protect equipment from rising floodwaters. But the flooding was more extensive than expected.

“We were expecting tides at 10 to 12 feet,” Mr. Miksad said. “Not only did we exceed those tides, we went up to 14-foot levels, which no one expected.”

Flooding left another 250,000 people without power.

— MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Rising water threatened the cooling system at the Oyster Creek nuclear plant, in Toms River, N.J., on Monday night. The plant declared an alert at 8:45 p.m., which is the second-lowest level of the four-tier emergency scale established by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The water level was more than six feet above normal. At seven feet, the plant would lose the ability to cool its spent fuel pool in the normal fashion, according to Neil Sheehan, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The plant would probably have to switch to using fire hoses to pump in extra water to make up for evaporation, Mr. Sheehan said, because it could no longer pull water out of Barnegat Bay and circulate it through a heat exchanger, to cool the water in the pool.

If ordinary cooling ceased, the pool would take 25 hours to reach the boiling point, he said, giving the operators ample time to take corrective steps. The reactor itself has been shut since Oct. 22 for refueling, so it is relatively cool.

Alerts are declared a handful of times every year among the 104 power reactors around the country.

So far, no reactors in Sandy’s path have been forced by the hurricane to shut down, although one in Waterford, Conn., Millstone 3, has lowered its power output to 75 percent. The operator said this was done to assist the New England grid, which would be destabilized if the reactor shut down suddenly from full power, and also to reduce the chance that it would automatically shut down; at 75 percent, Millstone 3 could withstand the loss of a pump without having to close.

Several other reactors in the region are now closed for refueling, which is ordinarily carried out in the spring or fall, when electricity demand is low.

— MATTHEW WALD

The storm surge in Battery Park City on Monday exceeded 13 feet, and was much higher than expected. Floodwaters rushed into the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel and seeped into the tubes connecting Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

CBS News showed footage of water streaming into the tunnel.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said water had also entered the No. 1 subway line between Chambers Street and South Ferry.

While the authority said it could not predict when service might be restored, officials estimated that pumping water out from flooded under-river tunnels could take anywhere from 14 hours to more than four days. It is possible that the subway system will return at partial capacity as floodwaters are pumped out of the system and imperiled equipment is inspected for potential water damage.

Some PATH train stations also flooded, a spokesman said.

Flood waters rush in to the Hoboken PATH station through an elevator shaft. #Sandy twitter.com/PANYNJ/status/…
— Port Authority NY&NJ (@PANYNJ) October 30, 2012

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

As trees fall, power shuts down and flood waters rise to higher than expected levels, New York’s 911 system is being deluged with calls, many unwarranted, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in a press conference Monday evening.

The volume of calls was creating a potentially dangerous situation as emergency officials were wasting time responding to requests that did not involve life-threatening emergencies, Mr. Bloomberg said.

The system was receiving 10,000 calls per half hour, Mr. Bloomberg said. On a typical day, it receives 1,000, he said.

There were dire situations unfolding across the city as Sandy pushed through the region. The mayor said the hospital at NYU Langone Medical Center had lost its backup power supply, forcing it to move patients elsewhere.

At least two people have died in New York, the authorities said. A 29-year-old man was killed on Monday when a tree crashed through his home in Queens. Another man in Queens was electrocuted, officials said. He has yet not been identified.

At his news conference, Mr. Bloomberg called on New York drivers to stay off the roads, saying they could interfere with the work of emergency officials.

— MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Just as executives of Con Edison finished methodically cutting off power to three relatively small parts of New York City’s power grid on Monday evening, an unforeseen event knocked the lights off for about 250,000 customers across a broad swath of Manhattan.

At about 8:30 p.m., electricity suddenly stopped flowing to apartments and office buildings from East 39^th Street all the way down to the southern tip of the island, said Michael Clendenin, a spokesman for Con Edison. The abrupt failure even turned Con Edison’s headquarters building near Union Square dark for several minutes before a generator kicked on, he said.

Several blocks away on West 14^th Street, traffic signals stopped working.

Mr. Clendenin said company officials assumed that flooding in substations interrupted the flow of power. He said they expected to be able to restore it before the night was over.

— MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

According to Connie Chirichello, a spokeswoman for the United States Postal Service, mail was “curtailed” in all five boroughs, as well as on Long Island, on Monday. In the five boroughs, mail carriers returned from their routes by noon. About 90 percent of the mail in postal boxes was picked up, but only until 1:30 p.m. Monday. Service at the postal lobbies in Manhattan and the Bronx closed at 9 a.m., and at noon in the other boroughs.

Depending on local conditions tomorrow, postal management will consider, on a case-by-case basis, whether it is safe for carriers to deliver, Ms. Chirichello said.

The famous motto of the U.S. post office that “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” apparently did not take a hurricane like Sandy into account.

“Every attempt was made to deliver mail today, however, with suspended subways, M.T.A. railroads and New Jersey transit, many employees were not able to make it to work,” said Ms. Chirichello, who added that the safety of the carriers was paramount, as was the fact that mail trucks should not get in the way of emergency vehicles. Also, the weather conditions endangered the safe delivery of the actual mail itself.

Because of the impact of the hurricane, the processing facility at the Morgan Station, on 31^st Street and Ninth Avenue, suspended postal operations from 4 p.m. until 7 a.m. tomorrow morning, Ms. Chirichello added.

She said that postal workers who could not get to work and wished to inquire whether their offices were open should call the USPS national emergency notification number at 888-363-7462.

— LIZ ROBBINS

John from Queens asks “How long will it take for the Transit Authority to resume service, and can they have partial service if some of the lines have flooding in places?”

The decision on when to restore service will hinge largely on how damaging the storm surge is to the authority’s equipment. Stations in low-lying areas and tunnels that go underneath rivers could be susceptible to flooding. Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has said that service could return about 12 hours after the storm ends in earnest, and officials have suggested that Wednesday is perhaps the likeliest day for service to return, but it all hinges on how the equipment holds up against the brunt of the storm. Switches can corrode if introduced to excessive salt water. And the authority’s electronic signaling system could also be vulnerable, Mr. Lhota said.

The authority also said that if subway tunnels that cross beneath the Hudson and Harlem Rivers become flooded, pumping the water out could take anywhere from 14 hours to more than four days. Obviously this could snarl several lines well after the storm has passed, but it is unlikely that a decision will be made on a restart of service until the authority can inspect its tunnels and equipment.

There is a precedent for the authority to bring back partial service without returning to an entirely normal schedule. After a storm in 1992, three tunnels flooded, and the authority briefly suspended service on every line. Many were restored the same day; the L train under the East River, however, was out of service for several days.

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Gov. Chris Christie each have their own styles of communicating to the public. In their emergency weather briefings on Monday, those styles were displayed in stark relief.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

No longer classified a hurricane but still a powerful system, the storm made landfall on Monday evening close to Atlantic City at about 8 p.m., the National Hurricane Center said.

The storm is now classified a post-tropical cyclone, having merged with a cold weather system approaching from the west.

But the center said the reclassification had no bearing on the powerful winds, driving rains and life-threatening storm-surge expected to accompany its push onto land.

The storm no longer has a warm center or convection, the upward movement of warm air through the eye, two key characteristics of hurricanes, the National Hurricane Service said.

The service said the storm was heading north-northwest at about 23 miles per hour, with maximum sustained winds of about 80 m.p.h., slightly weaker than earlier.

— MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

The community of Red Hook falls almost entirely within Zone A, for which Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg ordered mandatory evacuations Sunday afternoon. But even as water surged up the streets of the neighborhood on Monday, some residents lingered in bars.

— LISA FODERARO AND CARA BUCKLEY

The North Channel bridge, which takes the A train from Howard Beach, Queens, across the island of Broad Channel and into the Rockaways, was submerged by Jamaica Bay shortly before 7 p.m., a Metropolitan Transportation Authority spokesman reported on Twitter.

Shortly before 7pm, the North Channel Bridge, connecting the A train to the Rockaways, was submerged. #Sandy #MTA
— Kevin Ortiz (@MTA_NYCT_Vocero) October 29, 2012

— ANDY NEWMAN

Shortly after 7 p.m., a 30-year-old man was killed in Queens when a tree fell on his house, a fire official said. The man lived on 166th Street in East Flushing. His death was the first to be reported in the city linked to the storm.

— MARC SANTORA

As the floodwaters rose in Atlantic City on Monday and stranded unknown numbers of people who stayed behind, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey squarely laid the blame for whatever fate may await them in the lap of their mayor.

In the latest dispute between the men, Mr. Christie said he had heard that Lorenzo Langford, the mayor of Atlantic City, had told the city’s residents that they could ride out the storm at home or in a school a block from the ocean, directly contradicting the governor’s evacuation order.

“You have a mayor, a rogue mayor, telling his citizens not to leave, that it’s O.K. not to leave,” Mr. Christie said. “I don’t know what you call that. I don’t call it effective governance.”

The remarks came during Mr. Christie’s early evening news briefing on the storm at the state emergency command center in West Trenton. Mr. Christie spoke directly to those who stayed behind, saying the storm had grown too close and they would have to wait out the storm until it was safer for emergency workers to return.

The clash between the men, as reported by The Press of Atlantic City, began more than two years ago, when Mr. Christie proposed a tourism district in Atlantic City. Mr. Langford likened the district’s proposed borders to apartheid, which Mr. Christie called “playing to the lowest common denominator.”

The governor recently said Mr. Langford had “failed” as mayor and was “impossible to work with in any significant kind of way,” according to The Press.

Mr. Christie said he had been told that part of the mayor’s reasoning behind the instruction to stay in town was that some Atlantic City residents believed they had evacuated unnecessarily last year during Tropical Storm Irene, which did not cause the level of damage that had been expected.

The governor did not spare those residents his wrath.

“I will never understand these people,” he said. “They came home to very little property damage and they were alive. And they’re angry because they spent a couple of days at Rutgers. We’re going to see how they feel now, when they stayed. It’s just not acceptable conduct.”

But he focused his ire on the mayor, who may have been too busy to defend himself. Mr. Christie said the state had sent New Jersey Transit buses to evacuate people from Atlantic City, but evacuation personnel were told that many people felt they could stay because the mayor had said so.

“And now I’m going to have federal and state emergency personnel going in their first thing tomorrow morning with live downed electrical wires all over the place, risking their lives,” Mr. Christie said. “Because Mayor Langford was worried that some of his people were angry? That’s not leadership, everybody.”

Lest anyone think that Mr. Christie had been subsumed by politics amid a disaster, the governor, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in support of Mitt Romney, heaped praise on President Obama.

Mr. Christie said Mr. Obama had called to make sure he had everything needed from the federal government and left a number to call him directly at the White House should any unmet needs arise.

“I appreciate that call from the president,” Mr. Christie said. “It was very proactive. I appreciate that kind of leadership.”

— RUSS BUETTNER

Around 7 p.m. the torch at the top of the Statue of Liberty, which shone all through thick daytime fog, driving rain and an early nightfall, went black.

Soon after, lights began blinking out in buildings all over Lower Manhattan, and two flashes that looked like explosions lighted the sky above New Jersey.

— NATE SCHWEBER

At the Battery at the bottom of Manhattan, the water level was at 10.7 feet as of 7:20 p.m., breaking the record of 10.0 feet set by Hurricane Donna in 1960.

The level was expected to hit nearly 12 feet by the time the tide crests at 8:53 p.m., the National Weather Service said.

— ANDY NEWMAN

As the evening high tide was drawing closer, there were reports of flooding in several low-lying areas around the five boroughs, places that had not in recent memory experienced flooding. In Lower Manhattan, water crossed South Street, and cars could be seen floating on Wall Street on television screens at the ConEd headquarters. In Brooklyn, water had piled back onto Van Brundt Street — which flooded during the morning high tide — well in advance of the evening high water mark. At 7:25 p.m., Ninth Street in Gowanus was a nearly uncrossable river of water.

— WENDELL JAMIESON

As the surge of water pushed into parts of Lower Manhattan on Monday night, Consolidated Edison took the unprecedented step of cutting off power to customers because of weather.

The utility said it needed to do that to try to prevent damage to equipment stored underground so that power could be restored more quickly after the storm.

At 6:42 p.m., Con Ed shut down the first network at the southern tip of Manhattan, which serves 2,500 customers.

About 20 minutes later they turned off a second network in lower Manhattan that serves about 4,000 customers.

At about 7:47 p.m., with the tide at 12 and 1/2 feet above normal high tide, a Con Ed official called for the Brighton Beach network to be turned off. Suddenly, an additional 28,000 customers were without power.

— PATRICK MCGEEHAN

The facade of an apartment building at 92 Eighth Avenue in Chelsea collapsed around 6:20 p.m., the Fire Department said. No injuries were reported, and no one appears to be missing, a fire spokesman said.

— ANDY NEWMAN

This was atlantic city. Wow twitpic.com/b8lm7k
— OccuWeather (@Occuweather) October 29, 2012

At some shelters, the number of people seeking refuge in shelters set up by the city increased as the day wore on.

The total number of people at the 10 shelters administered by the City University of New York stood at over 1,200 late on Monday afternoon. There were 184 at the Hunter College shelter on East 68th Street, near its capacity.

The occupants were residents of  the Baruch Houses, on the Lower East Side, and some of New York’s homeless population. Students from Hunter’s Brookdale dormitory, on East 25th Street between First Avenue and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive, were sent across the street to the theater at Hunter College.

Rodrigo Garcia, a chef and a jewelry maker who normally sells in Bryant Park, called several city agencies asking to volunteer as a chef.  Mr. Garcia, 35, who said he has catered large events in Vermont, did not realize that the food at the shelters was already packaged and needed little assembly. He stayed anyway to help. “I put salt in the water with the meals,” he said. On the menu: chicken with noodles and rice with chicken.

Earlier on Monday, a relatively small number of people were at the Philippa Shuyler School on Greene Avenue in Bushwick.

Among them was Rossely Muñoz, 22. Ms. Muñoz’s parents lived through a terrifying earthquake in Mexico and did not want to leave on Sunday night, but Ms. Muñoz convinced her parents that they should leave their Bushwick apartment for a sturdier building. “My father was like ‘Ah, nothing is going to happen, please,’” she said. “I panicked. I tend to worry. So I was like, ‘Guys take this seriously.’”

She spent Sunday night in a classroom with her parents and two sisters. “My apartment is very old,” she said. “A lot of buildings here are not properly renovated. They have landlords where you constantly have to fight for them to fix things. I don’t trust them.”

At the shelter, workers and storm refugees gathered in the cafeteria to watch CNN. They also began eating the emergency rations — cereal and peanut butter and jelly — stored away at the school.

— LIZ ROBBINS AND JULIE TURKEWITZ

The Brooklyn, Manhattan, Williamsburg and Ed Koch Queensboro Bridges across the East River will close at 7 p.m., officials said.

In addition, two of the three bridges between Staten Island and New Jersey, the Outerbridge and the Bayonne, closed on Monday afternoon. With the 7 p.m. scheduled closing of the George Washington Bridge and the morning closing of the Holland Tunnel, only the Lincoln Tunnel and the Goethals Bridge will remain open as crossings between New York and New Jersey.

Scores of highways are also closing throughout the region, including the F.D.R. Drive south of 155th Street as of 6 p.m., the Garden State Parkway south of the Driscoll Bridge, and parts of the New Jersey Turnpike.

— ANDY NEWMAN

In late afternoon, Hurricane Sandy started to play havoc with overhead electrical wires.

As of 4:45 p.m., Consolidated Edison said the number of its customers that had lost power had jumped to 68,700 and was sure to keep rising as the storm neared the metropolitan area. Most of the power failures were caused by falling trees and branches’ pulling down cables.

About 21,800 of the affected customers were in Westchester County; 18,500 were on Staten Island; and 18,200 were in Queens. Most of the rest were in Brooklyn. The company has no overhead wires in Manhattan. Con Ed is regularly updating a map to show power failures.

Con Edison also said that it had expanded the area receiving automated calls warning of potential cutoffs of power networks to some of its customers in the South Bronx and some along the northern edge of Queens.

Jersey Central Power & Light, which provides electricity in many shore towns, had more than 290,00 customers without power just after 5 p.m.JCP&L’s map is here. Public Service Energy & Gas, also in New Jersey, reported that more than 74,000 customers were without power in counties between Gloucester in the southern part of the state and Bergen in the north. A map is here.

Connecticut Light & Power had more than 185,000 customers without power at about the same time. A regularly updated map is here.

— PATRICK MCGEEHAN

A replica of the H.M.S. Bounty, a tall ship built for the 1962 movie “Mutiny on the Bounty” starring Marlon Brando and used in the recent “Pirates of the Caribbean” series, sank Monday off the North Carolina coast. The body of one crew member, Claudene Christian, 42, was recovered; another crew member, Robin Wallbridge, 63, remained missing. The ship had been battered by 18-foot-high seas and thrashed by 40-mile-an hour winds from Hurricane Sandy, the United States Coast Guard reported.

In a dramatic early morning rescue over the Atlantic Ocean, Coast Guard crews in a pair of MH-60 Jayhawk helicopters hoisted up 14 sailors who had huddled together in the darkness on two covered life rafts as the Bounty, a 180-foot wooden vessel, took on water nearby.

A Coast Guard video (see above) shows one of the helicopters hovering — at times just 33 feet over the roiling sea — as a rescue swimmer in flippers helps stranded sailors into a small basket, which is then pulled up to the helicopter and then let down again for the next sailor. As each sailor is lifted to safety, the voice of the helicopter’s computer system can be heard repeating the word “altitude,” to warn crew members how close the chopper is to the water.

The Bounty, built in 1961 and based on the 1789 original, went down 90 miles southeast of Hatteras, N.C. – some 160 miles west of the eye of Hurricane Sandy.

When Coast Guard crews arrived after receiving a phone call Sunday night from the ship’s owner, who was not aboard, and a subsequent distress signal from the ship that pinpointed its location, the Bounty was already taking on water and had lost the use of its twin 375-horsepower engines.

The Bounty had been trying to sail from New London, Conn., where the ship had been docked to host a private party last Thursday, to an event scheduled for Nov. 10 in St. Petersburg, Fla., according to the Coast Guard and the Bounty’s Web site.

— TIMOTHY WILLIAMS

Half a dozen bridges in and around New York City are closing, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced Monday afternoon.

The Tappan Zee Bridge over the Hudson River, about 20 miles north of New York City, closed at 4 p.m.

The George Washington Bridge, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, the Throgs Neck Bridge and the bridges to the Rockaways are closing at 7 p.m., the governor said.

The Holland and Brooklyn-Battery Tunnels closed earlier in the day.

For now, the Lincoln and Midtown Tunnels will remain open, along with the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge and the Bayonne, Goethals and Outerbridge crossings.

But he added, “If the winds continue to increase, and the weather conditions get worse, they can close on very, very short notice.”

— ANDY NEWMAN

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

The storm captured Atlantic City early and refused to let go. As the rainwater and surging waters of the ocean that hugged the city’s beaches invaded its streets and wrenched apart pieces of its famed Boardwalk, the city was left an anxious and isolated island missing its slot-machine pulse.

Well before the worst ravages of Hurricane Sandy were expected to descend on the New Jersey coastline, Atlantic City was already in big trouble.

By high tide around 8 a.m. on Monday, officials said 70 to 80 percent of the city was underwater. Water as much as eight feet deep coursed through many streets, leaving them impassable. Heavy rains and sustained winds of more than 40 miles an hour battered the city.

All arteries leading into Atlantic City were closed, and officials speculated that they might remain so for days. No one could enter Atlantic City. Casinos were shut down.

“The city is under siege,” said Thomas Foley, the chief of emergency services. “Sandy is pretty furious at Atlantic City. She must have lost a bet or something. As we say in our slogan, ‘Do A.C.’ She’s doing A.C., all right.”

Atlantic City, by many projections, is at or near where the hurricane will make landfall. And so as flooding eased as the tide receded later in the day, city officials feared that the storm’s evil consequences might be far worse when the next high tide arrived at 8 or 9 p.m., around when landfall is anticipated.

The National Guard dispatched high-water trucks for the police and firefighters to try to evacuate some 400 people who had not heeded earlier warnings but later called for help. However, city officials said winds were approaching speeds at which they deemed it too risky to send out rescuers.

In the early afternoon, a gasoline spill inside City Hall from floating gas tanks in the basement shorted out some of the 911 equipment, and the city almost had to abandon its 911 system, but managed to keep it fully operative.

One 50-foot portion of the Boardwalk, worn down by earlier storms, was chewed apart. Chunks of woods floated down the flooded streets like crudely constructed rafts. “Timbers on Atlantic Avenue” came reports from first responders on police scanners.

— N.R. KLEINFIELD

Several readers have asked, “Will city government employees be required to go to work on Tuesday?”

Several readers, including Ryan Shaffer, asked about how city employees – many of whom were at work on Monday – would be able to get around the city, with the subways shut down. And Jonathan Masserano asked about city employees whose offices are in the low-lying Zone A.

At a briefing Monday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg defended his decision to keep most of the city government open for business on Monday, saying “that’s what we’re here to do, to serve New Yorkers.” But he did say that he had instructed his commissioners “to use their judgment” to determine if employees who were not involved in response or shelter operations could “leave work early to get home.” No word yet on Tuesday, though he did say that sanitation workers, for instance, would be on 12-hour shifts to pick up refuse, and clear storm debris.

— DAVID W. CHEN

Are the city’s jail inmates being relocated?

Inmates at Rikers Island are not being evacuated because the island is elevated and so not in any of the three evacuation zones, said Samantha Levine, a City Hall spokeswoman.  The areas surrounding the island — including Hunts Point in the Bronx and Randalls Island — are awash in yellow and orange, and occasional spots of red, signifying the three evacuation zones, but Rikers is higher up, Ms. Levine said.  It was not evacuated last year for Hurricane Irene, either.

— ELIZABETH A. HARRIS

The boom on a crane at the luxury skyscraper under construction at 157 West 57th Street was collapsing as of about 2:40 p.m., the Fire Department said.

According to scanner reports at 2:57 p.m., debris, glass and bricks were falling from the site onto West 56th Street. The authorities did not immediately have reports of any injuries.

The crane was dangling about 80 stories above 57th Street. Police officers cordoned off surrounding blocks as spectators withstood a bufffeting mist to gawk and take pictures.

The building, known as One57, is to be New York City’s tallest residential building and perhaps its priciest, with duplexes being offered for $90 million.

“We heard a big noise, and we didn’t know what it was,” said Victor Font, 40, who was eating lunch at Rue 57, a restaurant that looks out onto the high-rise. They rushed outside and saw the huge crane dangling over the street.  As the police rushed to the scene, he said, his first thought was: “What are they going to do?  How in the world will they bring that down?” At 3:15, with the wind starting to grow stronger, police officers began to widen the evacuation corridor, pushing pedestrians back to Fifth Avenue.

Damaged, dangling crane atop (for now) 1 57th Street NYC. twitter.com/jonathanwald/s…
— Jonathan Wald (@jonathanwald) October 29, 2012

Marc Santora and Randy Leonard contributed reporting.

— ANDY NEWMAN

Hurricane Sandy has forced airlines to cancel roughly 9,000 flights, stranding travelers and raising the prospect that air travel might not be back to normal until next week.

FlightAware, a data provider based in Houston, said that more than 6,800 flights were canceled on Monday. It said that 1,300 flights had been canceled on Sunday, and that many more were being dropped for Tuesday, when high winds and heavy rain are still expected to buffet the East Coast.

FlightAware said that Philadelphia International Airport led the way in cancellations on Monday, grounding over 1,200 flights. The three major airports in the New York City area each canceled around 1,000 flights on Monday, the data service said.

Kate Hanni, the director of FlyersRights.org, a passenger rights group, said that given high fuel costs, extra seats were hard to find on most airlines even before the storm.

“The airlines have cut back so much on staffing, and some are flying less, and I think it could take well over a week for them to reschedule all the passengers, ” she said. “We’ve got a huge problem.”

She said her group’s phone hotline was already flooded with calls from passengers who could not get through to the airlines, whose customer service numbers have been overwhelmed by the high volume of calls.

US Airways, which has substantial East Coast operations, said it canceled 1,641 flights on Monday, or nearly half the normal daily total for its entire system. It said it would shut down all flights to and from Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Washington on both Monday and Tuesday.

Delta and United said they would resume flights Tuesday around midday. American Airlines and American Eagle suspended flights at airports along the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions from 10 p.m. Sunday to about midday Wednesday.

American warned that the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy may force some additional delays and cancellations of scheduled flights beyond Wednesday.

Most airlines are allowing travelers to make changes with paying fees – and are granting refunds in some cases — for itineraries potentially impacted by the storm.

The best way to make flight changes is on airline Web sites. Airlines are also asking travelers not to go to airports for extended waits.

Given the storm’s huge expanse of rain and winds, some flights were canceled as far inland as Buffalo and Pittsburgh.

Jad Mouawad and Joe Sharkey contributed reporting.

— CHRISTOPHER DREW

The huge storm, which has been picking up speed and strength over water, was producing sustained winds of 90 miles per hour at 2 p.m., the National Hurricane Center said.

The storm was moving northwest at 28 m.p.h., a bit faster than forecasters had anticipated. They now forecast that the eye of Sandy will come ashore along the southern tip of New Jersey in the early evening. The storm will likely remain at hurricane strength for several hours as it moves inland.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

At the headquarters of Consolidated Edison near Union Square, company executives were expecting Hurricane Sandy to cause a record number of their customers to lose power. But the strong winds that would cause those problems are not the company’s primary concern.

The most critical question is how high the water in New York Harbor will rise on Monday evening. If the forecasts prove accurate, the storm surge will cause so much flooding in Lower Manhattan and possibly also in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn that Con Edison will take the unprecedented step of shutting off entire electrical networks because of weather.

“That is unprecedented for us,” said John Miksad, the utility’s senior vice president for electric operations. “We came close during Hurricane Irene.”

The networks would be shut down as a pre-emptive move to protect underground equipment. The three networks the company is considering turning off serve about 35,000 customers. But the total number of people affected would be a multiple of that number, Mr. Miksad said, because in some cases a single meter covers a large number of apartments.

Con Ed customers in the most vulnerable networks, as well as others in Manhattan as far north as 34th Street, have been receiving automated calls from the company warning them that their power could be shut off.

The tidal forecasts show the water rising 10 to 12 feet above normal. “We suspect that if we get to the upper end of that 10- to 12-foot range, we will not be O.K.”

By that, Mr. Miksad meant that he would expect to hear from crews monitoring critical equipment in those areas that floodwater was threatening to cause damage that would take much longer to repair than if the networks were shut down. The most susceptible networks in Manhattan are at the southern tip of the island and just north of there along the East River. That is where the worst flooding occurred in Manhattan during the Irene storm last year, he said.

The highest tide will occur after 8 p.m., but the surge could cause company officials to cut the power earlier in the evening, on short notice, Mr. Miksad said. And he added, if the surge is “worse than we’re expecting, we will be looking at other networks.”

— PATRICK MCGEEHAN

In Westchester, Robert P. Astorino, the county executive, toured the lower-lying towns of Rye and Mamaroneck on Monday. The choppy Long Island Sound surf already covered much of the beach at Rye Playland and was almost at boardwalk level. Still, he expressed concern about the number of people he saw casually walking around in areas that were supposed to be evacuated.

“This is not the time to be a hero, this is not the time to be a thrill-seeker,” he said. “This is a dangerous storm.”

Earlier, Mr. Astorino suspended the county’s bus service, the Bee-Line, and closed much of the flood-prone Bronx River Parkway.

The county has also closed all its parks for Monday and Tuesday and said county offices would be open but with limited staffing. Westchester County Airport is open but all flights have been suspended.  The Indian Point nuclear power plant is operating normally, the county said. A number of shelters are open in area schools and community centers, some of which also accept pets.

— JOSEPH BERGER

Proving that it is an independent branch of the government, the United States Supreme Court heard two hourlong arguments on Monday morning. The court has historically been reluctant to close its doors for weather. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who died in 2005, ordered the court to remain open during a winter storm in 1996 that shut down the rest of the federal government.

During the first argument, concerning government surveillance, Justice Stephen G. Breyer referred to Hurricane Sandy in questioning a government lawyer about how much proof was needed to show that something was bound to happen. “It might not be a storm tomorrow,” he said. “I mean, you know, nothing is certain.”

Shortly after the second argument, the court announced that it would be closed on Tuesday, rescheduling that day’s arguments for Thursday.

— ADAM LIPTAK

EGG HARBOR TOWNSHIP, N.J. – Parts of Atlantic City and other coastal communities in South Jersey were underwater on Monday even before the brunt of Hurricane Sandy arrived in the area.

Knee-high water filled streets in some parts of Atlantic City, where on Sunday the casinos had been ordered shut down and residents had been told to evacuate. Widespread flooding was also reported in oceanfront areas like Cape May, Wildwood and Long Beach Island. Here in Egg Harbor Township, about 10 miles west of Atlantic City, the rain and wind had grown stronger over the course of Monday morning.

More than 2,200 people were in shelters in New Jersey, according to the State Office of Emergency Management. But some people in the most vulnerable areas had hunkered down in their homes; in Cape May County, the southernmost portion of the state, officials estimated that perhaps 40 percent of the residents of the county’s barrier islands had decided to stay put.

Across the state, emergency officials urged people to stay indoors, asking residents not to be tempted to go outside to take cellphone pictures or video of the storm. Atlantic County banned travel on public roads, and the Garden State Parkway was shut down in both directions south of Exit 38 at the Atlantic City Expressway because of flooding. State officials warned that additional shutdowns of major highways were likely as the storm approached.

 

— THOMAS KAPLAN

The New York Stock Exchange announced that it will close again on Tuesday. Read more on Deal Book.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

The dire storm surge forecasts have raised the possibility that subway infrastructure will be damaged during the storm. Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said he was particularly concerned about the surge in Lower Manhattan, noting that saltwater and the subway system “do not mix very well together.” Switches could “corrode quite easily” if the water reaches them, Mr. Lhota said, and the electronic signaling system could also be imperiled.

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

WESTPORT, Conn. – Gusts of 50 miles per hour whipped through Connecticut on Monday morning, and high tide brought minor flooding along the coast, swamping roads and low-lying areas along the shoreline as residents braced for worse to come with the full moon this evening.

High winds caused scattered power failures across the state. About 15,000 people were without power as of noon, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy said at a news conference in Hartford.  Hundreds of thousands of residents were expected to lose power this evening as flooding and high winds were expected to grow more severe.  The tidal surge was expected to rise 6 to 11 feet, more than double last year’s surge from Tropical Storm Irene.

“The mother is yet to come,” he said.

United Illuminating Company put out a warning before noon that it was shutting down a flood substation in Bridgeport, cutting off power to about 35,000 customers.  But flooding was less severe than expected and the outage was averted, utility officials said.  The utility warned that it may be forced to close the substation this evening as the tide rolls back in.

In East Haven, roads along Cosey Beach were flooded and city officials were urging residents to adhere to a mandatory evacuation order.  In Weston, several miles inland, more than 1,000 people were without power.

In Westport, tidal waters surged over sea walls and engulfed Harbor Road leading to Saugatuck Island.  Many of the residents in the area, which received substantial flooding during Tropical Storm Irene, heeded evacuation warnings.  On one boarded-up house, a child’s note was posted on plywood panels covering the windows.  “Sandy go away,” it read.  “Don’t come back.”

 

— RAY RIVERA

Mamaroneck, a Westchester town that has both affluent and working-class areas, set up a shelter in its high school gymnasium, and by 10 a.m. Monday it held seven people. One of those was Owen Patterson, a 65-year-old Jamaican immigrant and retired  laborer who lives not near the flood-prone Long Island Sound shoreline but near a narrow river inland that floods badly in drenching rains.

He lives by himself, and he recalls a few years ago when a storm flooded the streets off Mamaroneck Avenue with five feet of water and he could not easily leave his second-floor apartment on the avenue. He does not want to repeat that experience.

“What goes up must come down,” he said. “I can stay in the building but can’t come downstairs. So I decided to ride it out here. I’m not going home until it’s safe to go back.”

The gymnasium was outfitted with more than 100 green cots loaned by the American Red Cross.  Luann  Jacobs and her husband, Matthew, volunteers for the Larchmont-Mamaroneck Community Emergency Response Team, were among those taking care of those — mostly elderly single people — seeking refuge. They recalled that during Hurricane Irene the shelter housed 200 people, so they expect many more to come Monday night.

In a wealthier area known as Orienta, water was lapping over the harbor walls and shoreline and flooding the harbor park and Rushmore Avenue, a main approach to the leafy Orienta peninsula.

“This is crazy,” said Robbie Goldberg, the owner of a Larchmont deli who came by to see the flooding and videotape it. “This early in the storm and the water has already covered Rushmore Avenue and the parking lots of both marinas.”

Although many stores and gas stations were shuttered and the streets were unusually empty of traffic, some people proceeded as if Monday was not out of the ordinary.

“It’s a normal day,” said Don Freda, the owner of Hennessy-Freda, an automobile repair shop and Citgo gas station on Boston Post Road, as he pumped gas in a customer’s car. “We come to work just as we always do. We’re open as long as the electricity stays on. “

— JOSEPH BERGER

The financial district was largely deserted, but there was much buzz about what was happening in the neighborhood on social media. Read more on Dealbook.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

All over Times Square Monday morning, tourists aimed their cellphones and cameras toward the gray and drizzly sky. With the city shut down tight, what else was there to do besides photograph the neon lights on Broadway?

Laura Taylor, an English and drama teacher at Lewis School in Pengam, South Wales, posed for a colleague, Mike Oliver, a history teacher, in front of the Times Square zipper, with the police station framed in the background.

They arrived Sunday and booked trips to all the usual tourist sites. But with the theaters dark and Central Park and most stores and restaurants closed, they were wandering around, improvising.  “We’re going back this Thursday, so we’re not thinking we’re going to see too much,” Mr. Oliver said. Still, he was upbeat, adding: “That’s life. This is still a great piece of Americana. We’re doing this just because we’re trying to make the most of what we can.”

Being from Wales, he added, they were used to wet and windy weather, but they did not consider the impending hurricane a joking matter.

Down the block, a group of four friends from England took pictures of the bright lights of the Hard Rock Cafe, which was, however, closed.

“Strange, isn’t it?” said Julian Cooke, a farmer from about 20 miles west of Oxford, looking around at the other dazed and glum-looking tourists, who looked like characters in an apocalypse movie, milling about aimlessly and gazing anxiously toward the sky. He was traveling with his wife, Sarah, and another couple, Rob Tylee, a Baptist minister, and his wife, Sue.

Ms. Tylee was optimistic despite the weather. She said she was still hoping to get to the Museum of Modern Art, Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s before their flight home on Wednesday. What will they do if they have no flight home on Wednesday? “No idea,” she said.

— ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

From Wall Street to restaurants and stores, businesses up and down the East Coast are closed. The storm is expected to have a major economic effect.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

They were crestfallen, whimpering in disbelief. The city’s dogs walked right up to an east side entrance of Central Park, saw the fence and could not fathom why they – and their owners – were not allowed in. For a little wind? Light rain? They had seen worse.

“I may have to carry him away,” said John Blondel, nodding to Rollo, a spry-looking white Labrador who was 10 and a half years old. Rollo decided to engage in a sit-down strike in front of the 79th Street entrance on Fifth Avenue.

Mr. Blondel, 56, who is in the investment management division for Goldman Sachs, had driven from his apartment in the West Village to give Rollo his daily constitution. Later, he would work from home. “This is going to be it for a while,” he said to his friend.

Soon, Rollo was joined by several other dogs dragging their walkers to yet another blocked entrance. “They’re just amazed,” Mr. Blondel said.

When a gust of wind blew an opening in the temporary fencing, Rollo was wise to the opportunity. Mr. Blondel had to pull him back and head to the car.

The city’s parks had been closed since Sunday evening, and the morning scene was an abject one indeed. As joggers dashed by on the slippery, leaf-laden sidewalk adjacent to the park – some took advantage of the empty bus lanes to run in the street – they had to dodge the dogs, who were similarly displaced from their morning routine.

— LIZ ROBBINS

President Obama, echoing mayor and governors across the Northeast, urged people in evacuation zones to get out of the way of Hurricane Sandy.
“Please listen to what your state and local officials are saying,” the president said in a nationwide address at 12:45 p.m Monday. “If you are not evacuating when you’ve been asked to evacuate, you are putting first responders in danger.”
The president said, regarding preparations and emergency response to the storm, “I’m confident that we’re ready but the public need s to prepare for the fact that this will take some time to clean up.”
The president waved off a reporter’s question about the storm’s impact on next Tuesday’s election.
“I’m not worried about the impact on the election,” the president said. “I’m worried about the impact on families, on first responders, on the economy and on transportation. The election will take care of itself next week.”

Hurricane Sandy may affect the ability of pollsters to capture the mood of the electorate in the final days of the campaign. Read more on the Five Thirty Eight blog.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

With the hurricane expected to make landfall near Atlantic City around midnight, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey warned Monday afternoon that for residents in evacuation zones who had not left yet, time was running out, and for some of them it was now too late to leave.

“They are now in harm’s way and I don’t know if we can get them out now,” the governor said. “These decisions were both stupid and selfish and I don’t know if we can get them out in the next 12 hours.”

He said that tens of thousands of residents were already without power.

And he added that he was “trending” toward ordering state government offices and schools to close on Tuesday.

— ANDY NEWMAN

With mass transit expected to remain shut through Tuesday morning, city public schools will remain closed on Tuesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said.

“There’s no chance that mass transit will be back in time to serve people,” the mayor said.

The mayor delivered a stern warning to those who had defied his evacuation order that time was running out for them to get safely out of their neighborhoods.

“The window for you to leave is closing,” he said. “You should have left but now it’s getting to be too late to leave.”

Mr. Bloomberg said that about 3,000 people had come in to city shelters, a tiny percentage of the 370,000 covered under the evacuation order, most of whom are presumably staying elsewhere. Pets are allowed at shelters, and the mayor said that about 70 had been brought in.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York is giving a briefing on Hurricane Sandy.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

New York City’s public agencies are purportedly open for business on Monday, per Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s instructions.

But a search for public servants near City Hall on Monday — amid a shutdown of virtually all of New York’s mass transit network — proved somewhat futile.

The doors to the Department of Buildings, at 280 Broadway, opened with a gentle nudge, but the lone security guard stationed inside quickly indicated that the entry was mostly symbolic.

“Are you open today?” a reporter asked. The guard shook her head and made a throat-cutting gesture, then smiled apologetically.

City Hall itself was almost entirely deserted, although its stoic French Renaissance facade appeared unruffled in the morning winds.

The interior hallways had a ghostly feel. The office of the City Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, was completely empty, although its gate remained open.

The mayor’s insistence that city employees go to work on Monday — despite closed schools, no mass transit and a general encouragement from public officials to stay inside — raised eyebrows among some municipal observers. But asked about it at a Sunday news conference, Mr. Bloomberg said the city must function when its denizens need it most.

“We need the city workers,” Mr. Bloomberg told a reporter. “We all take great pride in our dedication to serving the public, and this is something that we are going to have to do. It may be inconvenient, hopefully it’s not dangerous, but city workers are here to help others, and I think they all understand that.”

A spokeswoman for the mayor, Julie Wood, said on Monday that many city employees were working in the field, rather than offices.

— MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM

Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland gave an unvarnished assessment of the grim situation as the storm raked the coast and roared inland, warning that “there will be people who die and are killed in this storm.”

“We need to watch out for each other, but the intensity of this storm is such that there will undoubtedly be some deaths that are caused by the intensity of this storm, by the floods, by the tidal surge, and by the waves,” he said in a news conference from the state’s emergency center.

Shifts in the storm’s trajectory are now raising concerns of flooding in the Chesapeake Bay. Rather than pushing water out of the bay as originally anticipated, the storm now appears poised to push water inland into rivers and streams already likely to flood.

High winds will most likely force the state to close the long Bay Bridge that links mainland Maryland to the Delmarva Peninsula, which is already seeing damage from the pounding surf, he said. Residents should “hunker down at home with your families — it’s going to be a long 24 to 36 hours,” he said.

“The more responsibly citizens act, the fewer people will die,” he said.

— THEO EMERY

Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia said on Monday morning that about 150 people had checked into the city’s three emergency shelters. Occupants include adults, children, dogs, cats, a turtle and a spider, he said.

In an interview with KYW Radio, Mr. Nutter said winds at about 6 a.m. were sustained at 21 miles per hour, gusting to 28 m.p.h. Those speeds are likely to double later in the day, he said.

 

“It’s bad, and it’s only going to get worse,” he said. “It’s getting colder, there’s more rain, it’s very windy.  This is a serious storm and you need to take it seriously.”

A refinery operated by Philadelphia Energy Solutions is cutting its output in response to the storm, said Cherise Corley, a spokeswoman for the company, which normally processes 330,000 barrels of crude oil a day into petroleum products. “We continue to monitor the storm and take the appropriate precautions. We are currently running at reduced capacity,” she said.

 

 

— JON HURDLE

The Holland Tunnel and the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, which are particularly prone to flooding, will close at 2 p.m., Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said.

— ANDY NEWMAN

New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo briefed New Yorkers Monday morning on Hurricane Sandy.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

The flooding in New York City’s coastal and riverfront neighborhoods that accompanied this morning’s high tides will recede a bit as the day wears on, but it is only a dress rehearsal for tonight’s surge, the National Weather Service said.

Forecasters are expecting a 6-to-11-foot surge to hit the city at high tide around 8 p.m. – the highest surge of the entire storm cycle.

“What we’re seeing now is just the beginning of what we’re going to be seeing worse, later,” said David Stark, a meteorologist at the weather service office in Upton, N.Y.

At the Battery at the bottom of Manhattan, the water level was eight and a half feet at Monday morning’s high tide, considered moderate flooding. Tonight at the Battery, Mr. Stark said, “We may see water level of 10 or 12 feet which is a major flooding category.”

Tonight’s high tides will coincide with Hurricane Sandy making landfall in southern New Jersey. “All the water the hurricane is bringing will be pushed on-shore right at high tide,” Mr. Stark said. Tonight is also the peak tide time in the lunar cycle (full moon is at 3:49 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, not Sunday as reporter here earlier).

— ANDY NEWMAN

Via @greenpainting, the view from Red Hook: twitter.com/greenpainting/….
— Sam Sifton (@SamSifton) October 29, 2012

— SAM SIFTON

In Battery Park City:

Battery Park esplanade under standing water #sandy twitpic.com/b8gxwm twitpic.com/b8gxzw
— Newyorkist (@Newyorkist) October 29, 2012

And along the East River at the end of Wall Street:

East River rises above last two steps of Get Down, and approaches third, on esplanade at end of Wall St #sandy twitpic.com/b8gpf2
— Newyorkist (@Newyorkist) October 29, 2012

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

The flooding in the Jamaica Bay, Queens neighborhood of Meadowmere. Courtesy of Kim Zatto, bait purveyor. twitter.com/coreykilgannon…
— Corey Kilgannon (@coreykilgannon) October 29, 2012

— COREY KILGANNON

President Obama on Monday canceled an appearance at a rally in Florida to rush back to Washington to monitor preparations for Hurricane Sandy. Read more on the Caucus blog.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

On the Upper East Side, a man who gave his name only as Patrick was trying to catch a cab to his job at a Midtown bank. He lives across the river in Hoboken, N.J., but he stayed with a friend in Manhattan because the PATH train was shut down.

“It’s obviously not that bad right now,” he said of the weather before the expected rain had started. “I just wish the subway was open.”

Doormen at several buildings on Park Avenue in the upper 80s said there were fewer cabs out than normal. Alberto Ventura, who works at 1111 Park Avenue, was outside with a resident who stepped into a cab just before 7 a.m.

“We were waiting about a good 10 minutes,” Mr. Ventura said. Normally this early there is little wait for a ride, he said.

— RANDY LEONARD

In Brooklyn, south of Williamsburg and into Dumbo, Monday morning dawned calm, with a few gusts of powerful wind. A smattering of stores were open, mostly bodegas like J&J Navy Yard Sub Shop, owned by Marcos Martinez, who said he could not afford to stay closed.

“I can see there’s no storm happening yet,” Mr. Martinez, 47, said shortly after 6 a.m. He had driven to work from Park Slope.

How was business? “It’s a slow morning.”

A few lonely-looking police officers stood on street corners as the first fat drops of rain began to fall around 6:30. Workers in front of a Chinese market on Flushing Avenue were even seen sweeping fall leaves into dustpans on the sidewalk by their front door.

Some people were walking to work, in the absence of mass transit.

Felix Toro, 23, walked from his home in Fort Greene over the Manhattan Bridge to his barista job at Bowery Coffee on Houston Street. He said his boss had offered him the day off, but “I didn’t want to spend today at home.”

“I wanted to see what it was like,” said Mr. Toro, who carried a dry change of work clothes in a plastic bag slung over his shoulder.

He said he was prepared to sleep at the coffee shop if he became stranded by the storm.

“I don’t have a death wish or anything,” he said.

— NATE SCHWEBER

The police have been going door to door in the evacuation zone. No one is going to drag you out of your house if you refuse to leave.

But the National Weather Service issued a rather blunt warning on Sunday to those considering defying an evacuation order:

THINK ABOUT YOUR LOVED ONES, THINK ABOUT THE EMERGENCY RESPONDERS WHO WILL BE UNABLE TO REACH YOU WHEN YOU MAKE THE PANICKED PHONE CALL TO BE RESCUED, THINK ABOUT THE RESCUE/RECOVERY TEAMS WHO WILL RESCUE YOU IF YOU ARE INJURED OR RECOVER YOUR REMAINS IF YOU DO NOT SURVIVE.

Those in New York City who refuse to evacuate will also earn the wrath of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as well as the wrath of Hurricane Sandy itself, as Cara Buckley reported Sunday night.

But in the Rockaways, where rain has begun to fall, plenty of people were around. “Don’t leave the castle,” a father of four told WINS-1010 radio. “I don’t think my safety’s at risk. We’re going to tough it out and play Wii all day until the power goes out.”

— ANDY NEWMAN

Any worries that the canceling of all mass transit would clog the roads with excess drivers appeared unfounded at the start of what would normally be the Monday morning rush.

As of 6:20 a.m., there were no reported delays at bridges and tunnels and no reports of extensive road congestion anywhere. “Not many people driving on the L.I.E. or the Northern or Southern State,” said the 6:18 report on WCBS 880.

There are, however, road closings, either preemptively — like a stretch of the Bronx River Parkway — or because of flooding: Route 7 in Hudson County, N.J., and Routes 18 and 27 near the Raritan River and New Brunswick. Route 36 out to Sandy Hook, N.J. is also closed.

— ANDY NEWMAN

A three-masted tall ship that is a replica of the H.M.S. Bounty was in distress off the coast of North Carolina with 17 people aboard, as Hurricane Sandy barreled up the seaboard early Monday, the Coast Guard reported.

Coast Guard Sector North Carolina received a call from the ship’s owner, who had not heard from the crew since late Sunday evening, the report said. A Coast Guard command center in Portsmouth, Va., then received a signal from a radio beacon registered to the Bounty that indicated where the ship was and that it needed help.

A plane crew found the ship caught in 40-mile-an-hour winds and 18-foot seas about 90 miles southeast of Hatteras, N.C., the Coast Guard said.  The 180-foot-long ship reportedly had no power and was taking on water.

The Coast Guard said that it was monitoring the situation but did not report having rescued any of the crew or passengers.

The Coast Guard said that the Bounty’s crew decided to abandon ship because it was taking on so much water. The crew and passengers donned cold-water survival suits and boarded two 25-man lifeboats lowered from the Bounty,

The lifeboats were equipped with radios, so their passengers could continue communicatingwith the Coast Guard, a Coast Guard spokesman said. He said that the Coast Guard had not decided yet whether to attempt to rescue the evacuees by helicopter or with a cutter.

— PATRICK MCGEEHAN

The approach of Hurricane Sandy may have shut down Broadway theaters on Sunday night, but it did not blow all of the tourists out of Times Square.

Late into the evening, hundreds of people milled about in the cool, fresh air, bathed in the glow of electronic signs and giant TV screens. They seemingly had no place to go: All the stores had been closed for hours, many surrounded by sandbags that appeared too small to hold back much more than the overflow from a bathtub.

Restaurants that normally would cater to the after-theater crowd were dark. Even the flashy McDonald’s on 42nd Street had closed at 5 p.m. The only culinary offerings were the street meats sizzling on pushcarts parked all around the square.

But, save for the ominous, swirling images flashing on the giant screens overhead, nobody would have known that a monster storm was chugging up the seaboard. Tourists perched on the red staircase over the discount-ticket booth and chatted in various languages, undaunted. Some posed for sketch artists while others grinned for cellphone snapshots.

Several police officers were posted around the square, but they were so idle that one used the trunk of his cruiser as a desktop while he caught up on his paperwork. The clearest sign that something was amiss was that there were virtually no private cars mixed in with the stream of yellow taxis flowing slowly down Broadway.

All of the locals had heeded the warnings to get indoors and stay there. Only the out-of-towners were braving the tame streets of Midtown.

— PATRICK MCGEEHAN

The Weather Channel’s live coverage of Hurricane Sandy.

With Hurricane Sandy still churning several hundred miles off the Eastern Seaboard, its impact was already being felt in mid-Atlantic states late Sunday night.

There were reports of roadways flooding, and Gov. Jack Markell of Delaware ordered that no one would be allowed on Delaware roads after 5 a.m. on Monday.

Along the Maryland, Virginia and Delaware coasts, winds began to pick up intensity, and bands of rain whipped coastal towns.

Near the Norfolk Naval Station, there were reports of sustained winds of 45 miles per hour and gusts topping 53 miles per hour.

The latest forecast from the National Hurricane Center, issued at 11 p.m., said that the storm was still 470 miles from New York City and moving northward at 14 miles per hour.

It was not losing steam as it plowed forward. Hurricane force winds over 75 miles per hour were measured by monitors on ocean buoys 170 miles from the storm’s center. Tropical force winds extended 520 miles from the heart of the giant weather system.

The computer tracking models showed the storm still likely to make landfall somewhere in the vicinity of southern New Jersey by late Monday evening.

In Ocean City, Md., where residents were evacuated earlier in the day, live-streaming Web cams – now disabled —  showed the storm surge already reaching up to the boardwalk.

— MARC SANTORA

PHILADELPHIA — Kwame Osei-Prempeh, 26, an immigrant from Ghana in West Africa who now lives in Newark, was among the legion of travelers trying to find their way to the New York region on Sunday.

His trip had begun on Saturday in his hometown of Kumasi, Ghana, where he gone to set up a film and music business. He took a bus to the capital, Accra, a plane to Lagos, Nigeria, and another flight to Houston, where he learned that his connecting flight to Newark had been canceled. He quickly found a seat on a United Airlines flight to Philadelphia and his plane was one of the last to land at the Philadelphia airport before the authorities closed it to further arrivals Sunday night.

Mr. Osei-Prempeh then found his way to 30th Street Station in Philadelphia where he snagged a seat on an Amtrak train to Newark.

Judging by overheard conversations at the station, many other passengers  had also been forced to reroute by plane through Philadelphia.

Despite the fact that he had been traveling for 38 hours,  Mr.  Osei-Prempeh seemed to be in good spirits.

“I have no choice,” he said cheerily as he waited to board the train.

— KIRK SEMPLE

Subway, bus and rail services are shutting down from Virginia all the way to Connecticut ahead of Sandy’s expected landfall, mirroring New York City’s gradual closure of the subway and bus system.

In Washington, the Metrorail subway system and the city’s buses will stop running on Sunday night.  Metro has not said when service could be restored. Federal government offices in the Washington area will also be closed on Monday.

A bit further north in Maryland, MARC commuter train service will not operate on Monday.

In Pennsylvania, the rail, bus and trolley services around Philadelphia were to stop running late on Sunday night.

In New Jersey the NJ TRANSIT system started to gradually shut down on Sunday afternoon.

North of New York City, CTTRANSIT buses in Connecticut will suspend all service on Monday. No disruptions were reported to Rhode Island’s public transportation.

In Massachusetts, commuter boat service around Boston was suspended but subways and buses were expected to run as usual on Monday morning.

Amtrak said Sunday that it had cancelled “nearly all service on the eastern seaboard on Monday,” including all service to and from Washington, New York and Boston.

— BRIAN STELTER

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

Utilities throughout the region were scrambling Sunday to prepare for the worst.

In New York City, Consolidated Edison shut off steam to some of its customers in Manhattan — most of them large buildings — in advance of expected storm surges.

Hot water and heat no longer an option in Stuytown. ConEd shuts down steam vaults ahead of #Sandy in #NYC / Glad we showered earlier.
— Steven Dilla (@StevenDilla) October 28, 2012

Power companies were calling drawing on crews from outside their territories to clear branches and fallen trees, replace broken poles and string new lines once the winds die down. By Monday morning, Jersey Central Power and Light expected to have 1,300 crews, arriving from as far away as Florida and Iowa, to augment its staff of 400. Connecticut Light and Power was seeking 2,000 outside crews to fix lines and 700 to clear trees. Read more.

— PATRICK MCGEEHAN

Anna M. Freedman asks, “Where are the homeless being sheltered tonight? Is anybody doing outreach?”

The Department of Homeless Services has enhanced street outreach to encourage people on the street to seek shelter. Street outreach will continue during the storm, safety permitting, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Sunday.

The city has published a list of shelters open to the public on their Web site.

— MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Several readers have asked if Hurricane Sandy will actually be as bad as meteorologists are predicting.

Any predictions about the storm’s path and strength are subject to change, but forecasters and officials believe that Hurricane Sandy will have a significant effect on a large swath of the East Coast.

A major concern is the size of the storm. Forecasters warned that it could have ravaging effects far beyond its projected trajectory and urged people to heed calls for evacuation and prepare for the worst. Though the storm will not reach land until sometime on Monday, tropical storm-force winds will extend 520 miles from its center. Many regions will likely loose power, and there will be a significant danger of falling debris.

The storm surge is perhaps the most pressing danger immediately. In its latest report, the National Hurricane Center said there was a possibility of a storm surge as high as 11 feet above normal levels along Long Island Sound and Raritan Bay — significantly higher than in previous forecasts — and warned that major flooding could occur across the Eastern Seaboard. In addition to a storm surge, forecasters expected torrential rains in some regions, which would add to the flooding problems.

Emergency officials, local leaders and President Obama have urged people to take this storm seriously and heed the advice of local emergency services including requests to evacuate.

— MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

Kristen Hudak from New York City asks, “Any word on bridges and tunnels?”

Decisions on closings will be based largely on wind speeds and will be determined on a case-by-case basis, depending also on rainfall and roadway conditions. If sustained winds exceed 60 miles per hour, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates seven bridges and two tunnels, could close some or all bridges to traffic. At lesser wind speeds, there may be some restrictions on driving speed or the type of vehicle that can traverse a bridge. Updates can be found on the M.T.A.’s Web site or the site for the New York State Thruway Authority.

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Sharon S. asks, “How likely is it that the subway will continue to be closed Tuesday?

It’s looking pretty likely. Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, said Sunday morning that the authority hoped to restore service by Wednesday. “I do think Monday and Tuesday are going to be difficult days,” he said.

If you have a question about the storm, Tweet it with #AskNYT.

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Evacuations: Mandatory in Zone A, which covers parts of all five boroughs. See map for details and list of shelters.

Transportation:

M.T.A. subways, buses and Long Island and Metro-North Railroads: Service suspended beginning at 7 p.m. Sunday night. It is not clear when it will begin again. For status, check the M.T.A.’s Web site.

PATH: Suspended as of 12:01 a.m. Monday.

New Jersey Transit: Shutdown has begun, full shutdown expected by 2 a.m. Monday.

Amtrak: Northeast Corridor service north of New York stopping at 7 p.m. Sunday.

Airports: All major airlines expected to halt operations by Sunday night. Port Authority urges travelers to contact individual airlines. Updates can be found on the agency’s Web site.

Roads: M.T.A. may close bridges if sustained winds exceed 60 miles per hour.

Staten I. Ferry: Last boat from Staten Island at 8 p.m. Last boat from Manhattan at 8:30.

East River Ferries: Suspended.

*

Schools: Closed in N.Y.C. and much of the surrounding region. For updates in N.Y.C., check the Education Department’s Twitter page.

Garbage collection: Monday trash collection is on. Weigh down your trash cans so they don’t blow away.

Street cleaning and parking meter rules: Suspended.

City offices: Open (but not courts, see below).

Courts: Closed in N.Y.C. and on Long Island, as well as in Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Orange and Dutchess counties, except for arraignments and emergency applications.

N.Y.C. Parks: Closed.

N.Y.C. Libraries: Closed. Due dates postponed till libraries reopen.

Retail banks: Chase deciding on case-by-case basis. We are checking on others.

Stock Exchanges: New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq will be closed Monday. Read more.

Other general info:

Information for New Jersey residents can be found on the Web site for the state’s Office of Emergency Management.

Long Island residents can find updates on the Web site of the Office of Emergency Management for Nassau County.

Connecticut residents can go to the site for the state’s Division of Emergency Management and Homeland Security.

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER AND ANDY NEWMAN

The Brooklyn and Manhattan Cruise Terminals planned to clear out their vessels as Hurricane Sandy churned toward the city. In Manhattan, the Norwegian Jewel, Aida Luna, and Carnival Miracle cruise ships were expected to leave by Sunday night, said Kyle Sklerov, a spokesman for the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which manages the terminals. In Brooklyn, the Queen Mary 2 was expected to depart.

Mr. Sklerov said he did not know where the ship planned to go next. A message left for the Queen Mary 2’s operator was not immediately returned.

The storm’s approach also prompted the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey to close its maritime facilities beginning at midnight. The port terminals to be closed are: Port Newark Container Terminal, Port Elizabeth Marine Terminal, Port Jersey Marine Terminal, Howland Hook Marine Terminal on Staten Island, and the Brooklyn-Port Authority Marine Terminal.

Deep draft vessels have already departed the terminals. The agency said it was providing a safe berth for numerous barges, dredges, and floating cranes.

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Jon Cronin, left, with his son, Miles, 4, stacked sandbags against the entrance to his wife’s art studio on the Red Hook waterfront in Brooklyn. The building is within the mandatory evacuation zone.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

Sanitation pickups are scheduled to proceed as normal on Monday morning in New York City, the mayor said. He urged New Yorkers to put weights on or in their trash cans so they don’t get blown around.

— ANDY NEWMAN

Courts in New York City and seven downstate counties will be closed on Monday except for arraignments and emergency applications, a court spokesman said.

The counties outside the city affected by the closure are: Westchester, Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland, Orange, Dutchess and Putnam.

— ANDY NEWMAN

There were long lines at the Foodtown supermarket on North Third Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

The impending arrival of Hurricane Sandy has led to widespread cancellations of performances around the region. All Sunday and Monday night Broadway performances have been called off, according to a spokeswoman for the Broadway League, a trade association of theater owners and producers. Read more on ArtsBeat ».

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

In the Zone A neighborhood of Red Hook, Brooklyn, residents along the streets closest to New York Harbor were checking sump pumps in their basements, and piling sandbags against exterior doors.

Cars tore down Van Brunt Street and into the parking lot of the Fairway Market, where scores of people were stocking up on food supplies. (Jordana Rothman, the food and drink editor for Time Out New York, sent out a dire message via Twitter from the scene:

BREAKING: KALE SOLD OUT AT FAIRWAY. EVAC NOW! EVAC NOW! #sandy
— Jordana Rothman (@jordanarothman) October 28, 2012

Gino Vitale, a builder and landlord who owns several properties in the neighborhood, was delivering sandbags piled high in the bed of his white Ford pickup truck to tenants along Conover Street, a block from New York Bay.

“We dodged most of it with Irene,” he said, referring to last year’s tropical storm, which flooded basements in Red Hook but not much else. “I’m hoping we can do that again. This is a low-lying neighborhood, but this right here is the high spot.”

— SAM SIFTON

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey spoke in Pompton Lakes, N.J., Sunday afternoon, telling residents to prepare for record rains as the state braces to take the brunt of Hurricane Sandy.

— ANDY NEWMAN

By Sunday afternoon, more transit services announced their plans to shut down. NJ Transit said it would began a gradual suspension of service at 4 p.m., with no service by 2 a.m. PATH trains will stop running at midnight. Amtrak said on one of its Twitter pages that its Northeast corridor and Keystone trains would be cancelled on Monday.

The Staten Island Ferry will be suspended after 8 p.m. from St. George in Staten Island and 8: 30 p.m. from Whitehall Terminal in Lower Manhattan. The East River Ferry announced earlier Sunday that it would suspend service on Sunday and Monday.

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

Here is the city’s list of emergency shelters for those evacuating from Hurricane Sandy.

Shelter List (Text)

— ANDY NEWMAN

Hours before the deadline for a mandatory evacuation, the authorities on Sunday morning urged residents at the southernmost tip of New Jersey to head inland, but some were content to stay home and hope for the best.

Gov. Chris Christie ordered residents of New Jersey’s barrier islands to evacuate by 4 p.m. Sunday, and the Cape May county government said it would open a handful of shelters in safer inland areas. By early afternoon, a cold drizzle had begun to fall, and most of the spectators along the beach headed for shelter.

Some residents planned to hunker down. Scott Thomas, 56, who manages a jewelry store, pointed out that his apartment was in a brick building. “The big bad wolf can huff and puff all he wants, you know?” Mr. Thomas said. “There’s a lot of buildings in Cape May that I don’t think I’d want to stay in, but this one’s fine.”

Mr. Thomas was helping a fellow merchant, Joanne Klineburger, cover the front windows of her novelty t-shirt shop. They used the same boards that had protected the storefront during Hurricane Irene, using black spray paint to change “Go away Irene” to “Go away Sandy.”

Mike Keosky, 68, a human resources consultant, also pulled out the plywood that he had bought before Irene approached; he had stored it ever since behind his shed.

Taking a break from drilling, Mr. Keosky noted that he had a generator in his home. He listed several neighbors who, like he and his wife, Norma, were planning to ride out the storm in Cape May.  “Last year we went away for two days,” he said. “When I came back, all I had were a few leaves on the ground.”

— THOMAS KAPLAN

What was once without precedent will now happen for the second time in 14 months: New York City’s transit system is going dark.

But while the shutdown before Tropical Storm Irene last year began at noon on a Saturday — and the restoration of subway service began before the Monday workday — the suspension of subway, bus, and railroad service this time could prove particularly disruptive for the region.

Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, suggested the city could be without the bulk of its transit system for two full weekdays. By Wednesday, he hoped, some service might be restored.

While subways will begin suspending service at 7 p.m. on Sunday, some buses could remain on the road until 9 p.m. It takes about eight hours to shut down the subway system, but the bus system requires only six hours.

The authority’s hurricane plan calls for service to be suspended if sustained winds reach 39 miles per hour. Thousands of buses and subway cars have already been removed from service and stored in safe locations. Flood-prone subway yards and depots have been cleared, and subway stations in vulnerable areas, like Lower Manhattan, will be evacuated.

The authority said that “critical track-level components” were being removed from beneath river tubes to protect the materials from the corrosive effects of salt water in the event of flooding.

On Metro-North Railroad, equipment was to be removed from low-lying areas like the east end of a New Haven yard and Highbridge and Mott Haven yards in the Bronx. Some trucks, cranes, bulldozers and other equipment was being moved to higher ground. Plans included bringing trains into Grand Central Terminal for shelter.

Some wooden crossing gates were also removed and secured on both Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road.

The authority cautioned riders that a suspension of service on its railroads did not imply that power would be cut to the third rail or overhead wires.

The authority’s paratransit service, Access-A-Ride, suspended its outbound trips at noon Sunday; return trips were expected to continue until 5 p.m.

The authority said the Staten Island Railway would continue operations for as long as the Staten Island Ferry was in service, if conditions permitted, so that no riders would be stranded at the ferry terminal.

The authority’s bridges will close to all traffic if sustained winds reach 60 miles per hour. Required slowdowns will likely be instituted if winds exceed 39 miles per hour.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced that PATH train service would be suspended beginning at 12:01 a.m. Monday morning until further notice.

Operations remained normal at local airports, the agency said, but travelers were encouraged to check with their individual airlines.

Though Mr. Lhota expressed optimism about restoring service by Wednesday, a return to normal operations is likely to come in fits and starts. A little over 24 hours after subway, bus, and rail service was suspended for Tropical Storm Irene, some limited bus service returned. About 14 hours after that, the restoration of subway service began. Railroad service was restored on a line by line basis, as some required substantial cleanup of debris and mudslides and others waited on power to be restored.

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

The New York Stock Exchange still plans to open as usual on Monday, according to a notice posted to the market operator’s Web site. The exchange added that it is monitoring the weather conditions.

Because so much trading today is conducted electronically, the exchange has closed because of weather far less frequently. The NYSE shut down for three days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

— MICHAEL J. DE LA MERCED

Mickey and Minnie, Woody and Buzz, and Elmo and Cookie Monster were out in force in Times Square Sunday morning, but there were not many tourists to greet them.

“It’s the Frankenstorm economy,” said Mike Tyler, one of the many ticket agents canvassing the area’s pedestrian malls in search of someone — anyone — who wanted to a ticket to a show, a game or a tour. “It’s just way emptier.”

The crowds that normally clog Times Square were noticeably thin ahead of Hurricane Sandy’s arrival in New York, which has already prompted the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to announce a shutdown of subways, buses and railroads beginning Sunday evening. Although visitors from around the country and the world could still be seen lining up for Broadway tickets at the TKTS booth, posing for photos against a backdrop of flashing billboards and consulting pocket-size maps of the city, the looming storm thriving economic force that is Times Square appeared to be slowing.

Mr. Tyler said he had been instructed to discount tickets that he normally sold for $130 or more to $99 or less in an effort to attract buyers who were shying away because of the impending storm.

Contemplating such deals were tourists like Randy and Sherry Chapman, from Waterloo, Iowa, who had been planning their trip to New York for months and changed their flights to come in a day earlier when they heard news of the hurricane. They were scheduled to leave on a cruise on Wednesday, to the Caribbean — “where the storm came from,” said Mr. Chapman, 56, with a chuckle — but did not know if the ship would leave on time.

“We’re a little nervous,” admitted Mrs. Chapman, 61. The couple wanted to visit the 9/11 Memorial and the Statue of Liberty, but their plans had fallen into disarray. “It just kind of depends on what the storm does.”

“The storm might end up being the entertainment,” Mr. Chapman said.

Around the square, street vendors and store owners predicted the tourist hub would empty out by this evening. At the Yankees Clubhouse Shop, signs in English and Spanish announced that the store would be closing early, at 4 p.m., because of Sandy. Walter Wells, who runs a souvenir T-shirt stand, said he and other vendors were planning to leave well before the subways were to close at 7 p.m. They usually stay out until about midnight.

Mr. Wells bemoaned the lack of foot traffic. “I mean, I got bills to pay,” he said.

The TKTS booth was still doing a healthy business, though lines were shorter than usual. Agents near the line advised tourists that though shows would likely still go on Sunday evening, shows on Monday and Tuesday might be cancelled.

Then there were Donald and Terri Beak and their two children, who appeared relatively unconcerned as they wandered around the TKTS plaza, holding shopping bags from the M&M store. “We’re English; we don’t worry about things like that,” said Mr. Beak, 48, referring to the hurricane. “We’re used to rain and bad weather.”

Though they felt slightly inconvenienced by the transit shutdown, worrying that they might have trouble getting back to the city from the New York Jets game this afternoon, they said they would be happy to ride out the storm at a shopping mall somewhere in New Jersey.

“We just don’t think it’s as bad as the TV’s making it out to be,” Mr. Beak said.

Mrs. Beak appeared willing to give the meteorologists a little more credit. “Better to be prepared, I guess,” she said.

— VIVIAN YEE

The mayor’s evacuation order covers the part of New York City that is in “Zone A.” Want to see if you’re in that zone? The city’s interactive map did not immediately appear to be working, but here is a map from WNYC.

The mayor said that the evacuation deadline is 7 p.m.

— ANDY NEWMAN

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that school is canceled for tomorrow and ordered the immediate evacuation for coastal areas of New York City that are home to more than 350,000 people. They include:

*Parts of Manhattan along both the Hudson and East Rivers south of Midtown.

*Much or all of Coney Island, Red Hook, Dumbo, Brighton Beach and Manhattan Beach in Brooklyn.

*The waterfront fringes of Sunset Park, Williamsburg and Greenpoint in Brooklyn

*Most of coastal Staten Island.

*The Rockaways and parts of Long Island City in Queens.

*City Island in the Bronx.

— ANDY NEWMAN