Just opened this topic to hear from Empeggers on NY area. How are you guys doing?

Just fine. I'm on the waterfront in the Bronx and nothing too bad. I'm also not in any of the lowest points in the city, so I didn't consider leaving, just moved my cars (far, to an above ground garage up in White Plains) and boarded up the windows. My dock was under water until about an hour and a half ago, but the wind changed and that went down quickly. There's a very small amount of water in the basement, but that's most likely due more to the ground already being saturated before this storm came, than the hurricane. Less than an inch in total. For a pre civil war house, I'll take it. There are some flooded streets a few blocks up, but others are open and clear so one could still get out. The entire neighborhood did a good job of tying things down and bringing things in, so it's mostly small tree branches and leaves for a debris field. One of the tubes of the Holland Tunnel is flooded, the Rockaways are partially under water, one area of queens (name escapes me right now) that had a lot of small bungalows along side a canal now has floating bungalows. New Jersey seems to have gotten it worse than most of NYC as a whole.

Word on the street (from good sources) is that most of the emergency preparations that were taken were a dry run for the new response systems instituted post 9/11 to see if it all works in case someone is planning something for the anniversary. In all fairness, on September 11th and during the blackout 2ish years later, everything went pretty smoothly.

My bigger problem is the 12 people in my sub 1100 square foot house that have been here since Friday night well in advance of the public transit shutdown since they all live in Manhattan and we've all learned from experience it's way nicer to be in the Bronx during a blackout. Always nice to be woken up to the sounds of people arguing over the importance of shutting up and keeping quiet so I can keep sleeping. I love my friends but they have got to go.

Over here in southern Orange County, there are signs of flooding and I heard some trees crack, but I haven't left the house all day. I'm also without power for over 6 hours now. I'm actually surprised it hasn't been out longer.

Since I live in a community with well water, no power means the pump doesn't fill the holding tank. So, life without flush toilets is my primary concern at the moment.

Electricity is the only source of fuel here, so I can't cook anything. I've been living on fruit, dry breakfast cereal, beer and iced tea. Things could be much worse and at least AT&T still has functioning cell towers. I will live.

EDIT: Power was restored 10 minutes after posting this.

Not to diminish any impact NY felt, but I wanted to point out that this hurricane hit almost the entire coast. Almost 300K homes are without power in the DC area.

Fortunately my wife and I were lucky compared to others in our area. It was just a hard rain here. Lighter, in fact, than pretty much every other storm we've had this entire summer, just longer-lasting. We lost power for about six hours last night, but the food in our fridge seems okay

The biggest annoyance was that we were going to visit family in North Carolina this weekend. We decided to cancel because we didn't know quite how bad it would be. Our friends in Raleigh said that their water was out yesterday morning, but other than that I don't think they were too affected. I'd like to hear how Bitt is doing as well.

It also unfortunate that the dedication of the MLK Jr monument had to be delayed, though I'm glad I'll be able to go now...

I'm glad to hear you guys are all ok.

It seems to me, based on communication to friends in the NY Area, that mobile phone network never went down, mostly?

AT&T didn't go down where I was, although their tower closest to me was offline most of the day. During this period I had 1-2 bars of service that fluctuated between 3G and EDGE.

Most people I talked to on the phone yesterday have AT&T and they were also fine. I can't speak for Verizon, T-Mobile, or Sprint, but AT&T's network seemed to be just fine.

I only had about 1 hour of power yesterday before I lost it again. I have been without power from 6PM to 6AM when I left the house this morning. I'm sure it's still down at this point, but I hope it's back up before I return home. On the whole, however, loss of power isn't something to get too upset about. Much worse things have happened to others in this storm. If I lose some food in the fridge, that's not the end of the world.

Some of the roads by me are in rough shape. My normal route to work through Harriman State Park was closed. This isn't unusual when there's a lot of rain since the lakes end up flooding the roads. The northern section of the Palisades Parkway seems to have been flooded and then had the blacktop torn-up on purpose. A small section of it is just a mud puddle now. I'm hearing that sections of the NY State Thruway are still closed as is Route 9W (another north-south thoroughfare).

Pretty much the same for me as for Matt. It was basically just an extended windy rainstorm. I went out to eat that night, even, and I don't recall anything being closed. We weren't expecting anything severe at all, though.

Interesting that it may not have even been a hurricane.

Still seems to have managed to knock out power for a whole lotta people. My in-laws in the DC area are still without power.

Okay, I was wrong about that. We inspected things a little closer, and we had a LOT of bad food in there. Almost our entire fridge had to be cleared out.

That seems... harsh. After only six hours?

I sometimes have power failures here (there's a transformer down the street that keeps blowing it's fusible links, sounds like a bomb going off!) and six hours is not an unusual repair time. Without power my refrigerator gains about 1.5 degrees (F) per hour (there is a display on the outside that tells the interior temperature) and after six hours it will be at about 46 degrees (F) and the freezer at about 9 degrees (F). That is not warm enough enough to put food at risk over such a short duration.

It is a new refrigerator, quite large (26 cubic feet), energy-star rated (top 3% in it's size class) and uses 50 kWh per month, about $3.00 at the electric rate I am paying.

tanstaafl.

I'll just add that my power was off for 6+ hours, then on for one hour, then out again for another 22+ hours.

On Friday night, I filled a large ziplock bag with ice cubes and stuck it in the freezer. I also moved most items from the fridge to the freezer. I used the ziplock bag to judge how badly the freezer thawed.

At the end of my time without power, all the cubes were still in their pre-blackout shape and only a tiny bit of water had collected and refroze at the bottom of the ziplock. I decided to eat chicken from the freezer last night due to this, and I'm still alive/healthy.

My fridge is quite low-end and is probably at least 10 years old. Maybe you need a new magnetic door gasket?

Yeah, I have no idea why our fridge failed so miserably. In general our produce doesn't last long. I know the fridge stays cool because I have a fridge/freezer thermometer, and I've left it in there for weeks before and it never showed it was too warm. It's certainly no special fridge, and I'd love to replace it eventually, but for the most part it's okay. It's the kind with the freezer on top, and if we put anything near the middle-back of the top shelf in the fridge it freezes.

Oh well, I'm not really complaining because others had it worse with the power situation...