Wednesday, May 23, 2012 73° - Binghamton, NY

Discover Pipe Dream With Your Friends

Explore the news that your friends find interesting. Connect with Facebook to share your reading activity.

Long Island hit hard in multistate wind storm

This weekend’s weather brought turmoil to the East Coast, knocking down trees, cutting electricity and flooding streets across the tri-state area and beyond — leaving at least nine dead.

The storm, which battered parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and Connecticut Saturday with wind gusts of up to 70 mph, struck about two weeks after heavy snow and hurricane-force winds left more than a million customers in the Northeast in the dark.

At the storm’s peak, more than 265,000 customers in the New York City area and 235,000 customers in New Jersey were without power. The Philadelphia area reported 70,000 customers without electricity, while more than 80,000 customers in Connecticut were without power.

In Manhattan, Broadway’s sidewalks and trash cans were littered with hundreds of shattered umbrellas.

The storm has also taken at least nine lives in storm-related accidents over the weekend.

One person was killed and three others were injured in Westport, Conn., after a tree fell on a car Saturday night during the storm, police said.

In Suffolk County, police were investigating the death of a woman who was hit by a tree that fell on her Saturday night as she was leaving a family party in Bay Shore.

Flood warnings were issued for rivers in northern New Jersey, including the Ramapo River at Mahwah and Saddle River at Lodi, where minor to moderate flooding was expected Saturday night and Sunday. A coastal flood advisory was in effect for the Jersey Shore.

At least 4 inches of rain fell Saturday in parts of New Jersey, and an additional 1 to 2 inches were expected through early Sunday.

Some students from Binghamton University were witnesses to the weather’s destruction.

Emily Eisenberg, an undeclared freshman from Bellmore, said she had never seen anything like the storm.

“I felt like my whole house was shaking,” she said. “Trees were being uprooted like dominoes and one tree near my house broke the deck.”

Like many Long Islanders, Eisenberg said she experienced power outages as well as poor driving conditions.

“The trees took a lot of damage,” said Stacey Schwartz, a senior economics major from Bellmore. “The branches from the tops of the trees fell in front of my house and started blocking the roadways.”

Schwartz said she thought the area looked like a disaster with all the damage to houses. Her house did not experience as much damage; the wind just blew a few shingles off the roof.

It’s still raining hard in Massachusetts, where low-lying roads and basements are flooded. Workers had to throw up sand bags around the entrance to a subway station near Boston’s Fenway Park to keep the station from flooding.

Schools are closed in Connecticut, Massachusetts and on New York’s Long Island.

— Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

Logged into Pipe Dream and Facebook

  1. Stenger’s first semester is in the books

    — Pipe Dream sits down with President Harvey Stenger to discuss his first semester at BU and ideas for years to come.

  2. Union closure to displace workers

    — For the roughly 40 unionized Sodexo employees working in the New University Union Food Court and Susquehanna Room, the renovations to the University Unions mean new jobs, and possibly different hours and wages.

  3. Teacher evaluations overlooked by admins

    — Many believe that the Binghamton University’s treatment of teaching evaluations leaves students without a viable avenue to voice their opinions about the classes they take and the instructors who teach them.

  4. Police Watch: May 14, 2012

    — FRIDAY, MAY 4, 11:30 a.m. — A 19-year-old female student reported that she was being harassed by several people from her residence hall, College-in-the-Woods’ Mohawk Hall, said Investigator Patrick Reilly of Binghamton’s New York State University Police. The student said that in December she was harassed by someone in the laundry room of the building, [...]

  5. Student commencement speakers prepare for big day

    — Binghamton University released the names of the three students selected to speak on behalf of their classmates at Sunday’s commencement ceremonies.