It is raining again today in New York. Sandy is gone and gave us a few days of beautiful sun along with cooler temperatures and wind. But today, we are expecting the first Nor’easter of the season. This is a storm that moves up the east coast but enough offshore to only tease the mainland with high winds, rain and perhaps snow and high waves. Little comfort to the hundreds of thousand of people on the outer coast of New Jersey, Staten Island and the Rockaways who still don’t have power even if they have a house left to connect it to. The devastation is beyond belief as we are sure you have seen on the television.

Before we leave Sandy behind, one last picture. You may have seen this on the TV or elsewhere, but it is a telling one that is worth contemplating. It looks to have been taken on Thursday evening and looks up Manhattan from the Hudson River. It shows Manhattan and the Bronx and lights beyond. Over 3 million people live in the area included in the picture. In addition, if you use the average tourism to New York, there would have been about 140,000 tourists in hotels over the entire area. On Monday nite, Consolidated Edison announced it was turning off power in the Financial District and Battery Park City as a preventative measure. This would have included an area at the tip of Manhattan maybe up as far as the lights on the west side (left) are on.

At 8:30 a ConEdison substation at east 14th Street flooded unexpectedly and there was a terrific explosion. If you haven’t seen it, go to YouTube and look up ConEdison New York City Explosion. The water was 6 – 8 feet deep on the adjacent highway and the plant was not protected. That explosion left the entire area that is dark without power: Below 25th on the west side and below 39th on the east side, and including the lit area at the bottom of the picture. An estimated 1 million people were without power until Friday nite at 6pm. As we walked down 7th Ave from our daily adventures uptown to eat, charge our phones and do a little sightseeing, we walked into a wall of dark at 25th. The only light was from vehicles on the street. As shown in the picture, Battery Park City park got power the night before, although many buildings had water damage and could not be energized.

We travelled down to Battery Park and the Financial District on Saturday and it was an interesting sight. Tourists walked the streets working their way around the massive pumps taking water out of the Battery Tunnel, the subway tunnels and many of the larger office buildings along the East River. The Corp of Engineers were managing the process and they had set up a significant camp near the Staten Island Ferry Terminal. There are buildings on the Hudson River side that still don’t have power because they suffered signficant water damage to their electrical systems.

On Monday, Penny and I walked through the gallery district of Chelsea – the area west of us from 14th to 26th – and saw a remarkable thing. Restoration crews were in every building stripping wallboard up 3 to 5 feet from the walls. Don’t want to think about the asbestos that might be in these buildings. Not just a few buildings but hundreds of building were being dealt with. Generators still powered tools in many buildings. The sidewalks were covered with soggy wallboard, books, furniture and other belongings, waiting for the garbage trucks to take it away. Despite the setbacks of major flooding, and without any consideration of how soon it could happen again, remediation is underway. Time to get back to “normal”.

I will blog about the beautiful days we have had since Thursday last week, and especially our day in the area around Columbia University yesterday.

However the reality of Mother Nature has brought us back to earth. Athena has begun to bring its havoc. Winds are up and are scheduled to be steady at 40 to 50 miles per hour. The temperature is 37 but with the wind it feels like 30. And it just started SNOWING!!! It is wet and sloppy but it is snow. Waves and storm surge in the already battered outer coast areas are expected to reach 8 – 10 feet, likely bringing a second punch in the gut. Already there is some flooding and the worst is not yet here. Interesting that Athena was Zeus’ daughter, and virgin diety of greek mythology who was worshipped as the goddess of wisdom, fertility, the useful arts and prudent warfare. Interesting in this case she is delivering a very low and unfair blow.

We will survive this one much better than the last and are not concerned about power loss. Hopefully the weatherman is right and this will only last through tomorrow because we have things to do.