Building collapses in Bed-Stuy

From WPIX:

A four-story building at 1438 Fulton Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant collapsed suddenly around 2:30 p.m.

A person walking by the building was injured in the collapse. The extent of their injuries is unknown at this time.

Adjoining buildings at 1440, 1442 and 1444 Fulton Street are being evacuated as the FDNY and Department of Buildings evaluate their stability.

It’s still unclear if there are any occupants trapped in the debris.

The ol' reliable 7 train went down again

From the Daily News:

More than 540 New York straphangers were evacuated from a No. 7 train inside the tunnel under the East River on Monday morning after a mechanical issue led the tube to fill with smoke, officials said.

At least one person had been injured in the evacuation, officials said. The extent of the injuries was not immediately known, but wasn’t considered to be life threatening.

The trouble arose about 8:30 a.m. when a device known as a sliding shoe, which transmits power from the third rail to the train, fell out of position, an MTA spokeswoman said.

The shoe, as a result, touched a protective board, which caused smoke to develop and the train to come to a grinding halt.

The FDNY brought in a rescue train to evacuate passengers from the stranded one.

Greenwich Village building buckles and is evacuated

From CBS 2:

Residents living in a landmarked building in Greenwich Village are unsure of when they’ll be able to return to their homes, and it appears the property owner could have prevented the issue from occurring in the first place.

On Wednesday, an evacuation order was issued for 20 apartments and two commercial spaces at 85 Christopher St.

The Department of Buildings had been called in to investigate after it appeared the facade of the building, which was built around 1900, was buckling.

Following an initial investigation, officials said on Thursday that the supports between the roof level and sixth floor failed, causing the wall of the building to buckle outward.

Department of Buildings officials added that cracking was observed throughout the exterior of the building.

The incident should not have come as a surprise to the property owner, who was issued an Environmental Control Board violation in March, 2013 regarding the failure to maintain the building’s facade.

The property owner owes a $1,000 fine on the violation, the buildings department said.

In January the Department of Buildings issued a DOB violation with a $1,500 civil penalty to the property owner for failure to correct the previous violation relating to the building’s facade. The penalty has yet to be paid, officials said.

F train derails in Woodside

From CBS:

A Brooklyn-bound F train derailed Friday morning in Woodside, Queens.
The derailment happened at around 10:40 a.m. in a tunnel at 65th and Broadway.
The MTA reports the train was on the express tracks.
The FDNY is using access points to get to the subway and bring stretchers to the train.
There have been several minor injuries, according to CBS 2′s Kathryn Brown.

Art gallery building unstable

From NBC:

A landmark building on the Lower East Side was evacuated Monday evening after firefighters responding to a smoke alarm noticed floors were shaking and beams were cracked inside, setting off concerns over possible instability, officials say.

Crews were called to The Angel Orensanz Center at 172 Norfolk St. at about 7:30 p.m. for a smoke alarm going off, according to FDNY Deputy Chief Jim Hodgens on the scene. Firefighters determined the alarm was set off by smoke from cooking.

While they were investigating, firefighters were notified that the floors above were shaking, Hodgens said. Firefighters discovered several beams were cracked, signaling a possibly unstable structure, and immediately began evacuating the building.

About 500 people had to leave the building.

The building is a former synagogue that was restored as an art gallery and performance space in the 1980s, according to the venue's website.

Explosion and evacuation of Chinatown building

From NY1:

Fire investigators are looking into the cause of an explosion and partial collapse that injured nearly a dozen people Thursday in Chinatown.

It happened shortly before 1 p.m. inside a ground-level beauty shop located at 17 Pike Street near the Manhattan Bridge.

The fire department says at least eight people were being treated for injuries, three of which are said to be serious.

Four firefighters were also injured.

All were taken to area hospitals.

Witnesses at the scene say they first heard an explosion and felt the ground shake around the five-story walk up.

All tenants have been evacuated as a precaution.

Fire officials say the building had several violations on record.

And then this:

Sources say a common pest control tool could be to blame for a fiery explosion and partial collapse of a building in Chinatown.

Sources tell NY1 that fire officials are looking into the fact that several bug foggers, commonly known as "roach bombs," were found at the site of the Pike Street building.

Check out its past history here and here.

Coney Island structure unstable

From Eyewitness News:

Luna Park on Coney Island was evacuated Tuesday as investigators checked out a report that the "Astrotower" was swaying.

The fire department, buildings department, and Office of Emergency Management are working together on sorting this out.

Witnesses say it wasn't windy, drawing more attention to the swaying structure.

Emergency crews evacuated Coney Island's Luna Park Tuesday afternoon after getting frantic calls saying the Astrotower, a 270 foot tall, 50-year-old structure, was swaying and possibly unstable.

UPDATE from NY1:

Luna Park officials say a portion of the iconic Astrotower will be removed beginning Wednesday evening, after the structure was first spotted swaying heavily Tuesday.
The city Office of Emergency Management said Wednesday that cranes and heavy equipment need to be moved in for the work to start, and that the goal is to get started on the removal Wednesday night.

It is unclear how large of a portion of the tower will be removed.

Earlier, Luna Park officials said the park owners were working on permits with the city Parks Department to take down the structure.

Heavy rain causes wall collapse

From Eyewitness News:

Dozens of people had to be evacuated Saturday morning when a retaining wall collapsed in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.

The residents were evacuated from an apartment building on Cabrini Avenue, after the collapse at a building behind it on Pinehurst Avenue.

The building manager says a fire escape was ripped off a wall of the apartment building.

About 100 residents were displaced by the 4 a.m. collapse, which affected 35 apartments in all that face the rear courtyard.

It is still unclear when they will be allowed back into their building.

City revises flood zones

From the Huffington Post:

Hurricane evacuation areas would encompass 640,000 more city residents, and the number of zones would double, under plans disclosed Friday.

Details on the new zones won't be released until June, but the changes could mean neighborhoods around the city might newly be told to clear out ahead of future storms, even as the city grapples with findings that nearly two-thirds of people shrugged off orders to leave before Superstorm Sandy.

As officials reckon with a new understanding of flooding risks after Sandy, they aim to expand both the size and the number of zones so they can tailor evacuation orders better to the dynamics of a particular storm, Deputy Mayor Caswell Holloway said.

The idea: "Only dislocate the people who need to be dislocated and ultimately give people more confidence" that evacuation is necessary, he said at a briefing to release the city's self-analysis of its handling of Sandy.

More than 2.3 million people live in the city's three evacuation zones now. The roughly 375,000 residents of the most vulnerable area, called Zone A, were ordered to leave a day before Sandy walloped New York on Oct. 29.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave several televised briefings urging them to go, and the city sent out text-message alerts and dispatched police cars with bullhorns to some neighborhoods.

And yet a city-commissioned survey of 509 Zone A residents found 63 percent stayed home, according to the report released Friday.

Nearly three-quarters of them said they'd gotten the message that they were supposed to leave. But they didn't for a range of reasons, mainly that they thought the storm wasn't strong enough to imperil them or that their homes could withstand it. Some said they wanted to protect their property from damage or looters, or they didn't think the storm would hit.

The choice proved fateful for some New Yorkers. Sandy killed 43 people in the city, almost all of them in Zone A. Thousands of homes were destroyed or damaged, and an estimated 1 million residents lost power citywide.

16 people evacuated from 2-family house fire

From Eyewitness News:

Eleven people were injured, four of them seriously, when a smoky fire trapped a family in their second-floor home in Queens early Monday.

Firefighters were forced to rescue them through the windows.

The fire started in a kitchen of the apartment on 65th Avenue in Fresh Meadows just before 2 a.m., and officials say the situation could have been much worse if not for working smoke detectors.

Authorities say the family members - two parents and two children - were trapped in their bedrooms by the heavy smoke and began to lose consciousness.

Firefighters extended ladders to the second-floor windows and pulled out at least eight residents.

The 16 residents of the house were left homeless.

The cause of the fire is under investigation.

The reporter in the above video called the house a "multifamily home" but according to DNA Info the address is 169-03 65th Avenue, which is listed in DOB records as a 2-family house, which is exactly what it looks like.

16 people living in a 2-family home? Those must be some big families.

Chinatown SRO vacated by FDNY

From the Daily News:

Dozens of Chinatown tenants were evacuated Thursday from a single-room-occupancy building on the Bowery notorious for its makeshift cubicle dwellings.

Officials said they issued a vacate order for the top floor of the four-story building after firefighters responded to a complaint about living conditions at 81 Bowery.

The action left tenants homeless and concerned — and not for the first time. The building was evacuated in 2008 under similar circumstances and nine months passed before its inhabitants could return.

Firefighters and Buildings Department inspectors found “numerous life hazards” Thursday amid rows of rooms separated by thin partitions — many without ceilings, a Fire Department spokesman said.

“There were about 40 separate rooms with 40 people,” said the spokesman, citing “possible tampering with gas and pipes” and blocked exits and sprinklers.

City sends Sandy victims to unsafe housing

From CBS 2:

Victims of Superstorm Sandy who are staying in temporary housing aren’t expecting room service, but some say that they are living in shocking conditions.

“We’re victims of Sandy but we shouldn’t have to be punished because of that,” a man who identified himself as Monroe, told CBS 2′s Steve Langford.

Residents of these temporary lodgings have complained of a lack of heat and problems with infestation.

“The roaches, and a lot of it has to do with, the mice,” said one man.

Some Sandy victims have been lucky enough to be put up in hotels like the Holiday Inn and the Double Tree, but more than two dozen former residents of the Rockaways are living in a pair of run down rooming houses in the Longwood section of the Bronx.

Those two buildings have reportedly received dozens of housing code violations and have numerous fire safety problems. When CBS 2 stopped by, a smoke alarm appeared to be running on a low battery; the building’s super said that he would replace it.

And the rapid home repairs aren't what they're cracked up to be.

Long Island Sounds like B.S.

From the NY Times:

New York City’s health commissioner ardently defended the city’s decision not to evacuate hospitals and nursing homes before Hurricane Sandy, facing down withering questions Thursday from City Council members who contended that some old people may have died as a result.

The commissioner, Dr. Thomas A. Farley, said that the city and state health commissioners — ultimately reporting to the mayor — had made the best decision they could using information from the National Weather Service, which he said initially showed the brunt of the storm hitting Long Island Sound.

By the time on Sunday that it was clear the storm was threatening the city more directly, he said, “We couldn’t have accomplished the evacuation of everybody in Zone A before zero hour,” which appeared to be as early as midnight.

Part of Long Island Sound lies between Queens and the Bronx, so a storm surge should have been expected regardless of where along the Sound the storm touched down. Plus, the hurricane would obviously have had to pass over land before reaching Long Island Sound. (Makes me wonder if the health commissioner, city council and NY Times know where LI Sound actually is, since this was not explored further.) And how is it that City officials got different information from the National Weather Service than every media outlet that reported on the storm? I recall phrases like, "storm of the century" and maps showing the amazing width of the storm well before midnight, all of them showing a direct hit on NYC.

Of course, the decision to not evacuate had more to do with piss-poor planning: there was no place to send the evacuees and it cost a lot of money that the administration didn't want to spend. And despite the nonsense Farley spewed during this dog-and-pony show, people DID die after being evacuated, because the places they were sent were not prepared to take care of them. Here's what some of them are going through now. Sad, isn't it?

Maybe we need more hospitals...

From CBS New York:

From Manhattan to Queens, hospitals remained closed Wednesday night while smaller facilities are being forced to pick up the slack. A lack of space at the city’s medical facilities is leaving no room for error.

In Manhattan, the shadow cast by two temporarily shuttered hospitals has many residents concerned about health care.

Sandy’s flood waters triggered evacuations at Bellevue and at NYU Langone, two hospitals that may not be able to reopen for months. As a result, many patients are being forced to travel for medical care.

Mount Sinai Hospital took in more than 100 evacuees from Bellevue, and Langone and is functioning fine for now, but with winter approaching some people are left questioning how long that will last.

Another major concern is money. Rebuilding damaged hospitals could cost more than $1 billion. The city has allocated $300 million for Bellevue and Coney Island hospitals, but neither is expected to be up and running any time soon.

From The Observer:

As if Sandy hadn’t made enough of a mess of the New York City, and particularly a number of its hospital, a new report from Independent Budget Office has found that 20 percent of hospital beds here are at risk of further destruction, being in or near potential flood zones. Of the city’s 62 hospitals, which have a combined capacity of 26,451 beds, five were evacuated during Superstorm Sandy, displacing more than 2,500 patients as a result.

With another eight hospitals in or adjacent to evacuation zone A, the study is a worrying indictment of how New York’s indisposed might be affected by future natural disasters if flooding as severe as that during Sandy is to happen again—as many officials, including the mayor and the governor, believe it probably will.

Will health care facilities be better prepared next time?

From the NY Times:

Amid the worst hurricane to hit New York City in nearly 80 years, the home, the Promenade Rehabilitation and Health Care Center, failed to provide the most basic care to its patients, according to interviews with five employees, federal, city and hospital officials, and shelter directors.

Although nursing home officials say they cannot be blamed for what happened, the State Health Department has opened an investigation into Promenade’s actions.

Cold, thirst, fear: The situation grew so dire that the next evening, as the vestiges of the storm blew across the peninsula, ambulances arrived, evacuated the nearly 200 patients over several hours and deposited them in emergency shelters in the city.

In most cases, no Promenade staff member accompanied the patients, and many patients traveled without their medical records. Both are violations of state regulations.

Some family members are still desperately searching for their loved ones, with no help from Promenade, at 140 Beach 114th Street. These patients now live in various emergency shelters or have landed in cots and beds in hospitals and nursing homes across the region.

From The Huffington Post:

New York City hospital and nursing home patients and their loved ones might reasonably have believed they were safe as Hurricane Sandy approached. Mayor Michael Bloomberg had exempted hospitals and nursing homes in low-lying "Zone A" areas of the city from his pre-storm evacuation order. Much thought and planning had gone into the decision to "shelter in place."

But anyone following the recent history of how hospitals and nursing homes have fared in American disasters had ample reason for concern.

In many New Orleans hospitals after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, floodwaters knocked out vulnerable backup power systems. A day later, still awaiting rescue in intense summer heat, doctors at Memorial Medical Center were so desperate, they intentionally hastened the deaths of some patients by injecting them with morphine and sedatives, and ultimately 45 bodies were found at the hospital.

Over the past five years, I've reported on the impact of disasters on hospitals and medical systems, from Hurricanes Katrina, Gustav and Isaac in New Orleans to Hurricane Irene in New York. I'm also writing a book about this subject. So when Hurricane Sandy approached, I interviewed city and state health and emergency commissioners about their plans and the reasons for their decision this time not to mandate hospital and nursing home evacuations in the city's most vulnerable areas.

I pressed them on this even though there was every indication they and their staffs had diligently prepared for the storm. Last year, these commissioners decided that many of the same hospitals and nursing homes should be evacuated before Hurricane Irene, many of them shutting their doors for the first time in history in part due to the lessons of Katrina.

In interviews, they told me that the decision to evacuate last year was based on fears that an eight-foot storm surge could knock out backup power. Even after Irene proved less damaging than expected in New York City, they stood by their decision to shift thousands of patients to safer locations. It was much better, they said, to move patients in a controlled, calm environment with full power than it would be to empty hospitals in the midst of an emergency.

This time around, the commissioners decided not to order as many evacuations, an approach that puzzled me since the weather service was predicting as early as Sunday morning that the storm surge could reach 11 feet in lower Manhattan and, as early as Saturday morning, up to eight feet from Ocean City, Md., to the Connecticut-Rhode Island border.

What had changed in the intervening year? Were the hospitals and nursing homes better prepared to handle a hurricane? Were the lessons from other recent disasters being applied to a storm being described as the worst in a century?

I rented a car and drove to the Long Island command center in hope of finding out. The answers I came away with after reporting from crippled hospitals in Manhattan and Coney Island and darkened, sand-swept nursing homes by the ocean in the Rockaways highlight the complexities of that decision and raise some serious questions.

Evacuations ordered prior to weaker impending storm

From Eyewitness News:

New York City is closing all of its parks, playgrounds and beaches starting at noon Wednesday as a weather precaution.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg made the announcement at a briefing Tuesday.

Also, hundreds of nursing home residents in New York City's storm-battered Rockaways section are being evacuated ahead of a storm expected to bring more bad weather to the region.

State and city health officials said Tuesday that three nursing homes and an adult care center in the coastal community were being emptied of residents and staff.
More than 620 people live in the four facilities. None of those nursing homes had been evacuated for Superstorm Sandy.

Wednesday's nor'easter isn't expected to be nearly as bad, but health officials say the homes are already running on emergency generators. They are worried about first responders in the neighborhood being stretched too thin.

From NY1:

State Health Commissioner Nirav Shah and City Health Commissioner Tom Farley ordered the evacuations of the 181 residents of Park Nursing Home, 91 residents of Ocean Promenade Nursing Center, 180 residents of Peninsula Center for Extended Care and Rehabilitation and 173 residents of Surfside Manor Home for Adults.

Surges of three to four feet are expected in the area, which could damage the four facilities' generators, according to the State Department of Health.

A total of six facilities in coastal Brooklyn and 19 facilities in coastal Queens have been evacuated.

Some nursing homes still haven't evacuated

From the Huffington Post:

The previous few nights in New York have been quite cold, and temperatures are expected to plunge into the 30s over the weekend.

"I slept under a pile of blankets and coats last night," said Ray Velez, who lives on Beach 115th Street across from the burned-out section of stores and homes. At the height of the storm, as water flooded the peninsula, Velez was rescued from his home by firefighters in a boat as high winds whipped the flames around. Like other residents, he said he was grateful for the efforts of first responders, but surprised that priority hadn't been given to food and clothing aid.

One block from Velez and the burned businesses, 182 residents and dozens of staffers of Park Nursing Home were getting through another day.

The lobby of the building is a sodden, sandy mess, flooded by several feet of ocean water. So are a few dozen rooms and offices on the ground level.

Patrick Russell, the manager, said that the Office of Emergency Management did not try to move residents out of the nursing home before the storm. As The Huffington Post previously reported, the office did not evacuate any of the multiple nursing homes in the Rockaways ahead of the storm, even though the entire peninsula was in a mandatory evacuation zone.

But the facility in many ways is fortunate: The kitchen, though also on the ground floor, is on the uphill side of the building, and was spared from the flooding. So was the generator. There is plenty of food and heat, though hallways are dark and elevators aren't running. After the storm, his staff delivered 200 cream cheese and jelly sandwiches to the residents of another nursing home across the street, which had lost all power and were evacuated later that day.

Why is the Huffington Post the only news outlet reporting this major lapse in judgment by OEM? How many nursing homes still have residents inside them with feet of water in the lobbies and no elevators, preventing emergency access and food delivery?

And check this comment out:

"I have been working in nursing homes for over 25 years and I have never experienced anything as horrific as this. Our staff started preparing for evacuation days before the storm. We worked endless hours to prepare for what we thought would be an order to evacuate. Many hours go into planning the evacuation of a nursing home. Nurses and nurses aids are assigned to groups of residents so they will have familiar faces with them during this dificult time. Transportation was set up with ambulance, ambulette and bus companies to transport the residents. Every family was called to inform them where there loved one would be during the storm. Trucks were rented to transport beds, medications, food, wheelchairs, walkers, water, linens, diapers, wound care supplies, medical charts and more. It is an immense amount of work, but work that we understand is necessary to keep our residents safe. We waited for Mayor Bloomberg to issue the order to evacuate and were in disbelief when he announced the mandatory evacuation of zone A except for all nursing homes and hospitals. If a facility is perfectly organized and ready for evacuation, it still takes a minimum of 12 hours to evacuate. There are only so many ambulances and ambulettes to go around. How do you explain leaving the city's most vulnerable residents directly in a path of oncoming destruction. This storm was not a surprise, every channel was reporting for days how powerful and dangerous this storm was going to be. It was not a possibility, it was a certainty. We kept hoping that with every press conference and every NYS Department of Health notification, they would give the order allowing us to evacuate. But it never came."

MAJOR screw up by Bloomberg administration

From the Huffington Post:

The staff and residents of at least five nursing homes on the coastal edge of this storm-battered city were told by New York officials to stay put in advance of Hurricane Sandy, even though the facilities were in a mandatory evacuation zone and are just blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, according to accounts of those who work and live there.

As a result, hundreds of disabled, handicapped and elderly residents watched fearfully as one of the most severe storms in the city's history roared ashore, sending brackish water surging into the first floor of their buildings, flooding lobbies, basements and -- crucially -- backup power generators.

"It was like Niagara Falls," said a worker at Rockaway Care Center on Tuesday afternoon who was standing outside the building, a few feet from a huge pool of standing water. The worker, who declined to give his name, pointed to the high water mark, about four feet up the lobby door.

Inside, the water had torn apart interior walls. Sandbags that had been piled up outside were split open, their contents strewn about the lobby.

So why didn't they evacuate before the storm? "Call the mayor's office," an official at the facility said. "We were told to stay."

The New York Office of Emergency Management did not return multiple calls or emails about the condition of the nursing homes, the status of the residents, or the decision not to evacuate prior to the storm.

It's not clear what happened to the residents of Rockaway Care Center, or another nursing home in the community, Horizon Care Center. The entire community is without power, water or any other services. Shops and restaurants are closed. Phone calls to the nursing homes weren't returned.

The Huffington Post confirmed that at least two Rockaway nursing homes -- Surfside Manor and Lawrence Nursing Care Facility -- were later evacuated to Brooklyn Technical High School, in a leafy neighborhood of brownstones near downtown Brooklyn, on Tuesday night.

These facilities are all in Zone A. Why wasn't everyone evacuated, especially considering the frailty of the population? Heads should roll over this.

After the storm, Bellevue and Coney Island Hospital were also evacuated.

Crane collapses in high winds

From WPIX:

High winds from Hurricane Sandy's approach damaged a large crane atop the 75-story skyscraper One57, leaving it dangling at 57th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan as gusts from the massive storm begin to whip up.

Police are evacuating the area between Fifth and Eighth Avenues around 57th Street in anticipation that the arm could crash to the street. The arm of the crane, usually aimed skyward, has been doubled backward and is hanging limply with broken support beams jutting from all sides.

With wind speeds now approaching 90 mph as Sandy ramps up, it would be dangerous for workers to attempt to secure the crane at the top of the building.


A site in Williamsburg was also felled by the wind.

Some Rockaway residents are staying put

From the Queens Courier:

Despite calls from elected officials in the area, many Rockaway residents say they’re staying, and have hunkered down for the impacts of Hurricane Sandy.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced earlier today that NYCHA would begin shutting down elevator service, heating and hot water in the 26 housing developments within Zone A as a means to drive people from the flood zones and into shelters.

John D’Arrigo said he and his wife Ruthanne are staying put in their beachfront apartment — although they evacuated last year for Hurricane Irene.

“Last year we kind of evacuated,” he said on the boardwalk of Rockaway Beach, “but this time we’re going to stay here.”

D’Arrigo, like many others who plan to stay, said he stocked up on necessary items and will wait out the storm.

“We’re hoping for the best and preparing for the worst,” he said.

Likewise, Oscar Izquierdo said he was not worried about the storm, or flooding in his third floor apartment. His concern right now was potential flooding or water damage to his car.

The city has been working all weekend to build sand barriers around potential flood sites on the southern coast of the peninsula, particularly around Beach 116th Street and Rockaway Beach Park.