A Coney Island police house is inundated with water, forcing New York’s finest to improvise a daring escape.

As Sandy rolled toward Coney Island, whipping sand and debris across the famous boardwalk, officers at the NYPD’s 60th Precinct prepared to evacuate. As NYPD steamfitters Kevin Hunter and Anthony DiMaggio hurried to a subterranean boiler room to shut down the station’s heat valves, a burst of water—a “five-foot wave,” one cop said—smashed into the station, consuming the basement and knocking down one of the boiler room’s walls. Hunter’s leg was caught in the boiler’s machinery and completely submerged under water, and he was unable to get free.

In neighborhoods across New York City, buildings crumbled and fires broke out—and the sirens kept wailing.

The Big Apple started preparing in earnest Sunday, with officials preemptively shutting down the city’s famous public transit system and warning residents to be ready for the worst. Unable to nail boards across the windows of their high-rise buildings, New Yorkers instead filled their bathtubs with water, changed batteries in their flashlights, and, in some cases, stocked up on booze. By late-day Monday, the whimsy had turned to urgency. Unlike last year’s similarly feared, but ultimately feeble, Hurricane Irene, Sandy lived up to its hype.

A building in lower Manhattan—one of the world’s most important internet hubs—kept running, thanks to a small group of specialists.

While most of lower Man­hattan was without power, one key building remained lighted: 60 Hudson Street, one of the most important Internet hubs worldwide. Even during the worst of the storm, the building kept the country connected through an array of well-maintained generators.If you’ve ever sent an email, your data has probably trav­eled through a fiber-optic cable here. Built around 1929, the building served as the hub for Western Union’s telegraph network and is now known as one of the fastest connections between world financial centers; it maintains Internet connectivity for en­tire regions of the country.

As the storm surge rose, an army of health aides jumped barriers and waded through water to get to their housebound patients.

The real test of the army of caregivers for tens of thousands of seniors trapped at home when Hurricane Sandy slammed the East Coast began the day after the storm ended. Eloise Goldberg, the Visiting Nurse Service of New York supervisor for the Bronx and half of Long Island, stepped out of her home about 50 miles east of New York City on Tuesday morning, jumped into her car (her husband’s was crushed beneath an oak tree), and began to figure out how to get 11,000 home health aides and 3,500 clinicians to their patients.

A Coast Guard rescue swimmer dove into house-sized waves to save crew members from the sinking HMS Bounty.

U.S. Coast Guard rescue swimmer Randy Haba didn’t know it yet, but he was about to become the first of the first responders.When Haba fell asleep on Sunday, Oct. 28, at the Elizabeth, N.C., air station, Hurricane Sandy was still hundreds of miles out to sea. Landfall was still 24 hours away. And the storm wasn’t expected to make its savage westward turn until at least Maryland or Delaware.But then, around 3 a.m. Monday, an alarm sounded on base.

In a hospital without power, nurses raced to evacuate 19 newborns just barely clinging to life.

It was any NICU nurse’s nightmare. A hurricane, a flooded basement, a failed generator: then, terrifyingly, 19 critically ill infants in a hos­pital without power. In one humbling image of the evacuation at New York University’s Langone Medical Center—now ubiquitous—a team of medical professionals rushes a yellow stretcher with a nurse and small baby into an ambulance. Amid the unimaginable panic surrounding her, Margot Con­don—holding him—is a picture of calm.