The New York University Medical Center said it was moving these hundreds of patients because its backup generator was out.
“We are having intermittent telephone access issues, and for this reason the receiving hospital will notify the families of their arrival,” Lisa Greiner, spokeswoman with New York York University’s Langone Medical Center, told CNN. “They’re on backup power now and have been for the past 2.5 hours approx there’s no flooding in the hospital (may be flooding in basement).”
NBC News reports Sandy surged inland late Monday, killed at least eight people, and plunging “almost 5 million others into darkness and crippling transportation with historic flooding across a huge swath of the East Coast.”
New York and New Jersey have been hardest hit so far. Around 670,000 New York City residents were without power by time of publication. Half the city of Hoboken, New Jersey, is flooded, said Mayor Dawn Zimmer.
“It’s the worst I’ve seen,” said David Arnold, watching the storm from his longtime home in Long Branch, N.J., according to the New York Times. “The ocean is in the road, there are trees down everywhere. I’ve never seen it this bad.”
Throughout Monday, as winds strengthened to 90 miles per hour, waves swept away a historic pier in Ocean City, Md., WSJ reports, and left Atlantic City, N.J., largely flooded.
Snow is also beginning to make an appearance. It began falling in the mountains of West Virginia on Monday and was expected to intensify across Appalachia over the next day as Sandy merged with cold air from the west.
At least 12 deaths have been reported, including a woman in Canada who was struck by debris in the storm-soaked city of Toronto in Ontario.
MSNBC writes: “The National Hurricane Center re-designated Sandy as a ‘post-tropical cyclone,’ saying it was rapidly losing its tropical characteristics as it merged into an enormous nor’easter.”
