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.

DiMaggio screamed for help, and Lt. Peter O’Neill and his fellow officers rushed to the flooded room, which was already under eight feet of water—with it rising fast. “It was like a waterfall,” O’Neill, a 15-year veteran, recounted. “I’ve been in plenty of hairy situations, but this was probably the scariest thing I have experienced on the force.” The officers of the 60th Precinct sprinted down the stairs and, with a collective pull, yanked Hunter to safety.

With Hunter, the officers still had to evacuate person­nel from the flooding station. “I’m six feet tall,” O’Neill says, “and the water outside the precinct was up to my neck.” The taller cops walked, the shorter ones swam, to higher ground, where EMT-trained officers were loading injured evacuees onto buses to deliver them to a nearby hospital.

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. As the storm barreled in, New York firefighters fired up a saw in an attempt to remove a door in the East Village. On the west side, meanwhile, the brick façade of a building crumbled in a pile of rubble on a city sidewalk, leaving interior bedrooms exposed like some kind of life-size urban dollhouse. And on East 14th Street, a Con Edison plant exploded in an electrical fire that shot giant halos of light into the skies above Brooklyn. By Tuesday morning the storm had rolled on, but a quarter of a million homes and businesses were in the dark. In many cases, they were left without water as well. And it would be several long days before even traffic lights blinked red, yellow, and green again.

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.

“Peaceful.” That is how Condon, a 36-year veteran of the neonatal intensive-care unit at NYU, remembers feeling.

As Hurricane Sandy barreled into New York City, send­ing gallons of water into the basement of Langone, the generators failed and with it, the power. When news of an impending evacuation spread, Condon and her team of nurses in the NICU banded together. “We just did what we always do—what nurses do—we took care of the babies. We kept them safe.”

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.

Property manager Shaun Mooney, former Marine and volunteer firefighter, describes this job as “Mis­sion Critical”—“the lights have to stay on no matter what.” Preparation for Sandy started the week before the storm, with staff meetings devoted to assessing supplies and personnel needs. When power in lower Manhattan went out on Monday eve­ning, chief engineer Ernesto Martinez’s team monitored generators and pressure sen­sors. To make sure windows didn’t blow out, his team opened select airway chan­nels throughout the building to equalize pressure.

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. “We had been preparing our field staff for several days so they would have cellphone connections with their patients, but now we were up against massive flooding and blackouts and fires.”

On the Rockaway peninsula in Queens, where the Atlantic had cut through to join Jamaica Bay, nurses had begun to call Goldberg’s cell during the height of the storm on Monday. One nurse said she was wading in to reach trapped patients. She walked seven blocks through knee-high water to get to a group home and found medicines had been washed away. She would get prescriptions refilled and return, she promised. But by afternoon, downed wires sparked fires that eventually consumed 60 houses. By nightfall, more than 100 homes were destroyed. Many patients who had refused to evacuate were desperate to escape floodwaters that were climbing past the first floors. Each nurse on Goldberg’s Long Island team was reporting that they couldn’t find several patients. “The majority of our patients have been very calm through the hurricane,” Goldberg told me on Wednesday. “But if this continues—the blackouts, the lost power for communication, no water supply—I anticipate a very different reaction.”

“I’m providing essential emergency services,” she told police. She walked up 12 flights to administer the medicine and calm the patient, who, like tens of thousands of others, was sitting in the dark with no TV, no water or gas service, and (aside from a dying cellphone) completely cut off from the outside world.

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. A metallic voice crackled over the speaker: there is a boat off the coast that’s taking on water, it said, and there are 16 people on board. The HMS Bounty, a replica 18th-­century merchant vessel, had tried, for some reason, to sail around Sandy. The plan had failed. Now the waterlogged Bounty was sinking 90 miles southeast of Cape Hatteras, in the teeth of a once-in-a­-century superstorm.

Four days after Hurricane Sandy swept power and water from millions in New York and New Jersey, the streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown and Lower East Side were still quiet and dark. A few resilient vendors sat in front of darkened bodegas, selling prayer candles and batteries, as restless residents meandered. But the corner of Hester and Essex Street was bustling. And a crowd of people wearing blue strips of painter’s tape with the word “Volunteer” scribbled in permanent marker had set up shop as Occupy Sandy.

In the wake of the hurricane, Occupy Wall Street, which had been relatively quiet in recent months, had found a new cause to take on. On Tuesday morning, after the storm had subsided but New York City was still drying out, Michael Premo, whose relief efforts date back to Hurricane Katrina, and three of his friends from Occupy Wall Street headed to the Red Hook Initiative—a center where he’d worked in the past—to assess the situation. The outlook was grim. Premo said a worried volunteer told him: “We have no lights. We have no food. We’re in a situation here.” Premo said he told the volunteer: “You have a kitchen here. We will bring you resources and food.” That was the first community-based “hub,” as Premo refers to them. After posting a note on “Inner Occupy,” an online forum for those involved in the 99 percent movement, and blasting an email to friends, Occupy Sandy was born. Four days later, 13 centers had sprouted in destroyed communities from Rockaway Beach to Coney Island.

Talia Billig protested with Occupy Wall Street last fall. So when she was looking for an organization through which she could volunteer to help relieve those suffering after Sandy, she wasn’t surprised to find that the group making an effort in her own neighborhood was an OWS offshoot. “I live in Chinatown, and this is the sort of neighborhood that—for whatever reasons—wouldn’t get an organized citywide effort and that’s what Occupy is about,” Billig said. “It’s about common people helping common people.”

The floodwaters of Sandy highlighted the vulnerability of the Metropolitan Transit Authority, which oversees New York's subway, the Long Island Railroad, and Metro North, to a sizable storm surge and rising ocean levels. But the potential impact of such storms have been discussed for nearly a decade, and came into sharper focus in 2011 following Hurricane Irene. And New York isn't the only region whose public transit infrastructure is vulnerable to climate change and extreme weather. In 2011, the Federal Transit Administration released a report, Flooded Bus Barns and Buckled Rails: Public Transportation and Climate-Change Adaptation, which detailed the risk climate change posed to public-transit systems all over the country, and especially in New York City.

The report says that, given unavoidable warming due to greenhouse gases already emitted into the atmosphere, transit infrastructure will have to adapt to changed weather, no matter what actions are taken to reduce emissions. And it has turned out to be remarkably prescient.

Given the reality of global warming, the report says, The most disruptive near-term impact is likely to be intense rainfall that floods subway tunnels and low-lying facilities, bus lots, and rights of way. That accurately describes the state of New York's crippled public-transit system, with reduced subway and train service leading to massive traffic jams and gas shortages.

Unplugged residents in the still-powerless parts of lower Manhattan may not know it yet, but charities around the country are reeling in donations to help them, along with the millions of others up and down the East Coast who are suffering the aftereffects of Superstorm Sandy.

On Friday, the Red Cross announced it has received $35 million so far in donations intended for Sandy's victim's through a variety of channels, including online contributions, text messages ($10 per text), and a prominent button on the iTunes Store homepage.

More donations were expected to roll in following a hastily arranged benefit concert for Sandy's victims, featuring Bruce Springsteen, Jon Bon Jovi, Sting, and Christina Aguilera, and broadcast Friday evening on NBC.

The new numbers were a big jump for the aid organization, which on Wednesday said it had already raised $11 million.

"I think the word is certainly getting out," said Karen Stecher, a spokesperson for the Red Cross. "As people see the images on television, on our website, on social media, they're being motivated to step up and help."

(Click here for more information on how to help Hurricane Sandy victims.)

The need for immediate financial resources is still urgent: Nearly 6,800 people spent Thursday night in 97 Red Cross shelters across nine states, and the organization has served more than 215,000 meals so far, according to Stecher. Aid workers are distributing 60 trailers of relief supplies, including personal-hygiene items, clean-up kits, rakes, shovels, tarps, dust masks, and work gloves.

Other relief agencies have also seen spikes in donations since Monday's storm. As of Friday afternoon, the Salvation Army had received slightly less than $2 million in Sandy-related donations, including $1.77 million online, $45,820 through text donations (like the Red Cross, $10 per text), and $122,000 through its 800 number.

In New Jersey, the Salvation Army has provided more than 32,000 meals, 27,000 snacks, and 27,000 bottles of water.

Some organizations are finding that the donation rate has picked up particularly in the past 24 hours. "It's accelerating as people are grasping the extent of the damage and the emotional turmoil in many communities," said Leslie Gianelli, spokesperson for AmeriCares, which is based in Stamford, Conn. "Now that the stories of people are being communicated, it's almost becoming a Katrina-type reaction in the last 24 hours."

AmeriCares had taken in $850,000 by Friday afternoon, Gianelli said. "People are getting past the shock and people are taking a closer look at what's happening here."

Meanwhile, some agencies in New York were trying to raise funds while at the same time digging themselves out of the damage wrought by Sandy.

The United Way of New York City, which on Thursday announced a regional fund to assist the hardest-hit communities, was still operating without power on Friday afternoon. Its Midtown Manhattan offices sit less than two blocks from the blackout line.

"We set up camp at one of our board member's offices, but it's been quite a challenge," said UWNYC President and CEO Sheena Wright.

Wright said UWNYC, which raised more than half a billion dollars for the September 11th Fund in the years after the terrorist attacks, was focused on providing assistance over the long term, particularly for the low-income families that the United Way assists on a regular basis.

"If you haven't been to work in a week, you're most likely not getting paid, because you have a low-wage job," Wright said. "If your kids are not in school since Monday and you depend on that free breakfast or free lunch, you're in a lot of trouble right now."

Wright said donors—including corporate partners such as Starbucks, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America—had committed close to $1 million to the new fund as of Friday afternoon.

World Vision, a Christian humanitarian organization, had raised $290,000 as of Thursday, but had to contend with a flooded warehouse in the Bronx, which destroyed one third of all its relief supplies. World Vision provides kits of food, hygiene products, and flood-cleanup products, as well as blankets and tarps to those in regions, such as the Appalachias, where Sandy combined with other storms to dump several feet of snow earlier in the week.

There was also concern that in the wake of Sandy's destruction in the United States, the damage wrought by the storm outside the U.S. could be overlooked.

Before it clobbered the Eastern seaboard, Sandy swept through Haiti, Jamaica, and Cuba, killing scores and leaving thousands more homeless and at risk of waterborne diseases such as cholera. In Haiti, still recovering from the catastrophic earthquake that struck in January 2010, 52 people were confirmed killed by the storm while flooding left 18,000 people homeless.

The Calm Before the Storm

Here it comes. Watch a time-lapse of Manhattan’s Sunday afternoon skyline as the city braces itself for Hurricane Sandy.

El Bloombito Speaks Spanish Again

It was inevitable that there would be a backlash against the New York Marathon going ahead as planned this weekend. This is New York, after all, and whatever decision was made—go for it, cancel, or postpone—you knew some people would object, and object loudly. Especially if, like the New York Post or a borough president, they can score demagogue points by doing so.

But to see New York cave to the voices of fear, rather than of reason, is unprecedented, shameful, and wrongheaded. It’s an object lesson how well-meaning activists can undermine causes they seek to promote.

First, let’s be clear: superstorm Sandy is the most devastating thing to happen to New York City since Sept. 11. My city is crippled, thousands are without power, and now thousands more are struggling to get food, gas, and basic necessities. We are hearing stories of elderly people trapped in the upper floors of high-rises, and of people whose lives—particularly on Staten Island—have been destroyed. There have also been inspiring stories of personal generosity and governmental can-do.

The question, then, is whether the marathon would have helped, hurt, or been irrelevant to these efforts.