Internet Infrastructure in Manhattan (2024)

See the physical structure of the Internet

New York has been a crucial world-widetelecommunications hub at least since the 1920s.Telegraph cables and pneumatic tubes ran all overand under the southern end of Manhattan.Buildings that once were telegraph company headquartersare now home to major Internet facilities.And now there is very little distinction betweenvoice and data communications.

The picture at the top of this page is a view acrossthe East River from the Manhattan Bridge, looking towardlower Manhattan.Many movies set in New York show a similar view.And so every one of those shows the Verizon buildingnear the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Is it a bad idea to locate data centers in Lower Manhattan?

No, it's a good one, as long as you are careful about thedesign of your data center and its emergency processes.Let's say you put a data center well inland in New Jerseyor even farther into the hinterlands.The first hop for all that Manhattan based traffic is goingto be the same facility at 60 Hudson or 111 Eighth Avenuethat you were trying to avoid relying on in the first place.Besides, Tuckerton NJ and the surrounding area include thelanding sites for a number of cables to Europe,the Caribbean, and South America.

If you are really concerned about latency, remember thatthe speed of light is a hard limit.No faster than 300 million meters per second!So, 300 meters closer means one microsecond sooner.High-frequency tradingorganizations care about being a few blocks closer,especially when they get intoultra-low latencyactivity.

Speaking of hops, this page shows some places you usuallyjust see as router hops intracerouteoutput, but here you can see what some of the onesin Manhattan look like.

Is This Page Dangerous?

No.Calm down.These data centers are all heavily marketed.Several are such well known landmarks that they have theirown Wikipedia pages describing their current function.

In New York they don't panic if you photograph a bridge ora post office, unlike in Washington D.C. or a few countriesruled by paranoid thugs.

Settle down and enjoy the pictures.

60 Hudson Street

60 Hudson Street was built in 1928 through 1930as the headquarters of the Western Union Company.The company maintained its headquarters there until 1973,when they moved their headquarters to New Jersey.As seen here, we have just exited the Chambers Street1/2/3 subway station and turned to look north to the building.

Western Union was founded in 1855 as the consolidation oftwo competing telegraph companies founded in the precedingfour years.It bought up smaller companies, so that by 1860 its networkextended from the East Coast west to the Mississippi River,and from the Great Lakes south to the Ohio River.It established the first transcontinental telegraph linkin 1861, and from 1865 to 1867 it attempted a project tolink the U.S., by way of Alaska and Siberia, to Moscowand beyond to Europe.

Western Union was the source of the first stock ticker in 1866and the first standardized time service in 1870.This was followed by their money transfer service in 1871.By 1900, Western Union operated one million miles of telegraphlines and two undersea international telegraph cables.

Then Western Union offered the first consumer credit cardin 1914, intercity fax transmissions in 1935, andcommercial intercity microwave communication links in 1943.In 1964, the national network of copper telegraph lineswas replaced with microwave links.In 1974 it became the first U.S. telecommunications companyto operate its own fleet of geosynchronous communicationssatellites, known as Westar.These satellites carried Western Union telegrams and mailgramsand signals for its Telex and TWX radioteletype services.The transponder links were also leased to other companies.

Western Union had been involved in projects that grew intothe Internet.Plan 55-A was a fully automatic switching system withautomated routing, used as the last paper tape messageswitching system from 1948 through 1976.

Western Union was a prime contractor for AUTODIN, a U.S.Department of Defense telecommunications system developedin the 1960s.AUTODIN used mechanical punched card readers tosend and receive data over leased lines.At its peak, it handled over twenty million messages per month.But Western Union failed to design a useful AUTODIN II,at which point BBN developed a packet-switched network thatbecame ARPANET.AUTODIN lingered until 2000.

Costs rose, profits fell, and Western Union started gettingout of the telecommunications business.At the end of February, 2006, Western Union discontinuedall telegram and commercial messaging services.Telegram traffic had fallen to just 20,000 messages per month.

Today, Western Union is known mostly for check-cashing andmoney transfer, two financial services for which extortionaryfees are charged.And, Western Union services are popular with scammersand on-line criminals.See theWired article aboutRâmnicu Vâlcea,a Romanian town known to western law enforcement as"Hackerville", with just 120,000 residents and at leasttwo dozen Western Union locations within one four-blockarea downtown.

Now the building is once again a major telecommunications hub.It is now a carrier hotel where over100 telecommunication carriers have a presenceand over 300 domestic and international networks are housed.

A large number of individual companies' fiber optic linesrun into the building.It includes a 47,500 square foot meet-me roomwhere the many companies can interchange Internet traffic.

SeezColo's page for more details.They offer carrier-neutral data center space in suites,private cages, and lockable cabinets on floors throughoutthe building.There is in-suite connectivity to 48 different carriers.

Primary connectivity options include:
AT&T,BCE Nexxia Corp,British Telecom,Cablevision Lightpath,Cavalier Telephone,CenturyLink,CENX,Cogent Communications,Deutsche Telecom,Elantic,Energis,FiberNet Telecom,Global Crossing,Group Telecom,Hibernia Media LLC,Korea Telecom,Level 3,Lightower,MetCom,NOS Communications,Onvoy Inc,Pacnet,PCCW Global,Primus Qwest,RCN NY Com,Reliance Globalcom,Reliance Globalcom,SAVVIS,Shaw,Sidera Networks,SingleCNXT,Stratos Mobile,Telx,TW Telecom,Tricom,Verizon,Verizon Business,XO Communications,andZayo.

The building towers over the more typical buildingsof the Tribeca district, which tend to be just fiveto eight stories tall."Tribeca" is one of those common New York abbreviatedplace names, really TriBeCa, meaning theTriangle Below Canal Street.

In 2006, the New York City Department of Buildings approvedthe storage of nearly 2,000 gallons or 7,500 litersof diesel fuel on six floors of the building,adding to about 80,000 gallons or 300,000 litersalready stored in the building.I would assume that most of it is stored down belowground level.

There was opposition at the time, over concern that allthat fuel posed a fire hazard that could result in thecatastrophic failure of the structure.This is what happened to 7 World Trade Center during thatafternoon after the September 2011 terrorist attacks.

The opposition said that the storage would violate anexisting law prohibiting above-grounddiesel storage within 1,000 feet of the nearest wall of abuilding occupied by a school or hospital, or within 1,000feet of an entrance or exit from a tunnel used by motorvehicles, subway or railroad cars.The city said that the law was a part of the fire codeapplying only to wholesale bulk oil storage wherepetroleum products are offered for sale.

As we will see below in the section aboutHurricane Sandy in 2012,some times it is very useful to have some of your dieselfuel upstairs.

The Department of Buildings negotiated a variance to allowfuel storage on six floors in excess of code limits in returnfor installing fire safety equipment beyond what isrequired by law.

32 Avenue of the Americas

Just a few blocks north of 60 Hudson Street we come to32 Avenue of the Americas.It gets referred to asThe Hubfor its largemeet-me room,andCoreSite,for one of its major tenants.Amazon Web Serviceshas a major presence here.This is one of the few facilities thatAmazon openly describesas an AWS site.

The floors of the building have 14 to 19 foot ceilings.CoreSite advertises 50,000 square feet of data center here,with up to 25 kW of electrical power per cabinet backedup by UPS and generators.

32 Avenue of the Americas was completed in 1932 and becamethe AT&T Long Lines Headquarters.It housed switching equipment and control systems forAT&T's North American and Transatlantic networks.

The AT&T Long Lines networkwas originally based on heavy-duty open-wire copper lines.It reached west from New York to Denver by 1911.By 1914, vacuum tube amplifiers allowed the network tosupport coast to coast connections.Coaxial cable began to be used in the 1930s, with severalvoice signals multiplexed together as single sideband channels.This evolved through a series of designs combining more andmore voice channels, with the coaxial cable systems in the1960s hardened against nuclear war with all terminaland repeater equipment in hardened underground vaults.

Meanwhile, after World War II, klystrons developed for radarand other microwave applications were more capable andeconomical.Coaxial cables with 3,600 or 10,800 voice circuitsconnected major U.S. cities, and there was a digitalmicrowave waveguide system joining New York and Philadelphia,but most traffic moved over point to point microwave linksat C band, 4-8 GHz.

Television began to be carried on the Long Lines network.Coast to coast television distribution was first used torelay Harry Truman's address at the San Francisco PeaceConference in September, 1951.Proved to work by Presidential demonstration,it was then available for less significant applications.ABC's Monday Night Football could be broadcastlive nationally, and regional football game distributionwas possible before the development of portablesatellite uplinks.

By the 1970s, the AT&T Long Lines network carried70% of intercity telephone calls and95% of long distance television distribution.Starting in the 1980s, fiber optic and satellite linksbegan replacing the point to point microwave links.

Let's look inside!It was designed at a time when allegorical representationsof exotic foreign lands were all the rage.

33 Thomas Street

Just a few blocks away to the southeast is33 Thomas Street,definitely not in the style of the 1920s and 1930s.

This 550 foot slab-faced building is theAT&T Long Lines Building.Architects really do refer to this design as theBrutalist style.

It was completed in 1974, designed and built to housetelephone switching equipment and not humans.There are no windows in the flat facades, which are madefrom precast concrete slabs faced with pink flame-treatedtextured granite panels.The average floor height is 19 feet or 5.8 meters, with thefloors designed to hold live loads of 200-300 pounds persquare foot or 10-15 kPa.High floors, so there are only 29 of them in the 550 feet.

The building functions as a telephone exchange containingthree major 4ESS switches handling interexchange telephony,two of them owned by AT&T and the third by Verizon,plus several other switches used forcompetitive local exchange carrier services.It also houses data centers.

The 4ESS was the first digital electronic toll switchintroduced by Western Electric.Its design began around 1970, and it was introduced in 1976.The last one was installed in Atlanta in 1999.Almost 150 remain in service, including the three here.All have been upgraded from the 1A to the 1B Processor,and have 4E APS or Attached Processor System for long-termdisk storage of the programs and office data.All 4E APS units were upgraded to the 3B21D Computeraround 1995.The 4E APS connects to the Common Network Interface Ringto provide Common Channel Signaling.Peripheral units connect the switch to the transport network.

Bell Long Lines became AT&T Communicationswhen the Bell System split up in 1984.AT&T gradually moved switches and other equipment fromthe former Bell Telephone headquarters at32 Avenue of the Americas,completing the transition in 1999.

This building was designed to be entirely self-sufficientand resistant to nuclear fallout for up to two weeksafter a nearby nuclear blast.Physical security is very tight.

It certainly is not in the style of the rest of Tribeca.

The three large rectangular protrusions seen here running fromground level to the top,plus the three on the opposite side,house elevators, stairs and ductwork.The rectangular openings at the top and about a third ofthe way up are for ventilation.

Despite all the design and planning, it isn't perfect.It completely failed on September 17, 1991.

It was a combination of management planning failure,equipment failure, and human error.Because of the self-sufficiency plan, AT&T had aload-shedding agreement with Consolidated Edison, theelectrical power utility, where the facility wouldswitch from utility power to on-site generators onrequest from ConEd.

This switchover was a routine operation which usually workedwith no problem.But on this occasion, scheduled training got in the way ofthe standard procedure to check on all the equipment powersupplies, known as the DC plants.One DC plant had not successfully switched to generatorpower, and it went on battery backup.That was not detected until it was too late to maintainuninterrupted power.

The result was that over 5 million calls failed.The Federal Aviation Administration's private lines weredisconnected, disrupting air traffic control to 398 airportsserving most of the northeastern U.S.

When you switch to your on-site generators,make sure that you really have switched to yourgenerators.

In November 2016The Intercept announcedthat the Ed Snowdon papers revealed,I would think to no one's surprise,that 33 Thomas Street has been an NSA tapping point all along.The New York Times also reportedon the story.

Taconic announced that they would replace the largelyfeatureless facade as they redeveloped the building forcondominiums.It would have been spectacular housing, with 17-footceilings and views over the East River and Lower Manhattan.

Taconic had bought the building in 2007 for well below thecurrent going price for Manhattan property,but in 2011 it was purchased by Sabey Data Center Propertiesfrom M&T bank in lieu of foreclosure,for just two-thirds what Taconic had paid.

Sabey's president, John Sabey, said"As the few major existing data centers and carrier hotelsin Manhattan are nearing capacity from space, power,and cooling perspectives, we view 375 Pearl as anasset uniquely positioned to offer a world classcomputing environment for those users with on-islanddata center needs.The building has all the bones — an abundanceof power, a purpose-built structure, and tremendousprospects from a connectivity standpoint to be justthat."

By late 2016 the conversion was underway.

ITT made some unpleasant alliances along the way.After Hitler took power in 1933, one of the first U.S.businessmen he received was ITT CEO Sosthenes Behnand his German representative, Henry Mann.The ITT subsidiary the Lorenz Company soon came to own25% of Focke-Wulf, the German manufacturer of some ofthe most successful Luftwaffe aircraft.In the 1960s, ITT won $27 million in compensation for itsshare of damage inflicted on Focke-Wulf plants by Alliedbombing.Then there was ITT's involvement in coupsin Brazil in 1964 and in Chile in 1973.

ITT left this facility and moved their headquartersuptown to 320 Park Avenue in 1961.

That elaborate entryway is at the southwestern cornerof the building, seen in the picture below.The NYSE is up the street to the left.

The very close location makes this data center more attractivefor firms engaging in ultra high speed transactions alongWall Street.

Peer 1 Hostinghas a data center here, whichSquarespace and Fog Creek Software, among others, use.

Internap also has a data center here.Internap advertiseshaving 2 MW of generator-backedelectrical power in their data center here.But see below for the difficultiesyou can have fueling your generators.

MetCom Network Services,XO Communications,andFiberMedia Grouphave a presence here as well.

The Cunard Building at 25 Broadwaywas built as the company's U.S. headquarters in 1919.The many piers surrounding lower Manhattan,most of them torn down in the years since,were part of the busiest port in the world.

The great hall where the Cunard tickets were once soldis still decorated with paintings and murals showingthe Cunard routes and sea creatures.

The great hall was converted to a U.S. Post Office in 1977.

65 Broadway

65 Broadway is the American Express Building.It is also used by zColo andSwitch and Data New York.It has 15,000 square feet of colocation space and providesmultiple connectivity options.

The 21-story building with its unusual arched cut-outwas built in 1914-1917.It was the headquarters of American Express until 1975.

33 Whitehall

33 Whitehall housesDatagram,which hosts some high-traffic sitesincluding Gawker, Gizmodo, the Huffington Post,BuzzFeed and Mediate,plus data centers operated byTelehouse,NYCVPS,Enotch Networks,andCogent Communications,among others.

33 Whitehall is the 30-story polygonal glass tower.It was built in 1986.

40 Wall Street

40 Wall Street was built in 1929-30as a 927-foot, 70-story skyscraper.It was the world's tallest building for a few months,until a spire was added to the Chrysler Building.Then eleven months later, the Empire State Buildingwas completed and stood taller than both.

On the evening of May 20, 1946, a U.S. Army Air ForcesC-45 Beechcraft crashed into the 58th floor on the northside of the building, creating a 20-by-10-foot holeand killing both crewmen and the three passengerson board.LaGuardia Field was reporting heavy fog and aceiling of just 500 feet, obscuring approximatelythe top half of the building.The plane was flying from Lake Charles Army Air Fieldin Louisiana to Newark Airport.

40 Wall Street now houses XO Communications andControlCircle Ltd.

14 Wall Street

14 Wall Street, with the steppedpyramid at the top, is at the corner of Wall and Broaddirectly across from the New York Stock Exchange.TW Telecom is among the tenants.

The architectural design concept is theMausoleum of Halicarnassusplaced on top of Saint Mark's Campanile in Venice,a "temple in the sky" based on one of theSeven Wonders of the Ancient World.

Its construction in 1910-1920 started with thedemolition of the 20-story Gillender Building,making this what some claimed to be the first caseof one skyscraper being demolishedto make way for another, taller one.At its completion it was the tallest bank building inthe world, with 37 floors and standing 539 feet tall.

The 31st floor was once J. P. Morgan's apartment.FDM Group,an international IT services provider,now uses the Morgan apartment.They kept many of its original features, includingits bar, fireplace and wooden floors.

80 Pine Street

80 Pine Street houses aGlobal Crossing data center.

100 Williams Street

100 Williams Street houses aNew York Internetdata center that is both their headquarters and theirlargest data center.It covers over 30,000 square feet and meets SSAE16, HIPAAand PCI compliance requirements.

121 Varick

Moving uptown past Canal Street along Varick Street,we come to 121 Varick Street.

This fairly nondescript building houses a number ofdata centers.Tenants include:Atlantic Metro,Steadfast NetworkandData Center NYC.

Atlantic Metro has 15,000 square feet of space withanother 10,500 available for expansion.UPS capacity is N+1 300 KVA,battery capacity is 15 minutes at full load.Generators are two 1.5 MW units with 7 days worthof diesel fuel.

Atlantic Metro has a data center here.They were knocked offline when Hurricane Sandy hit in 2012,as utility power was shut down and the building'sgenerator room was flooded.

More onHurricane Sandy and its impact onNew York networkingcan be found below.

111 Eighth Avenue

111 Eighth Avenue was completed in 1932 as theUnion Inland Freight Terminal #1,later known as theCommerce Buildingof the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

It is an enormous building, filling the entire block betweenEighth and Ninth Avenues and 15th and 16th Streets,with almost three million square feet of floor spacespread across fifteen four-acre floors with ceilingsover fourteen feet high and windows ten feet tall.See the cross-hatched block on the map.The elevators can lift entire trucks to upper floors,the trucks up to 32 feet long and weighing up to 20 tons.

New York Governor Franklin D Roosevelt,soon to be elected U.S. President,broke ground for the project in 1931.He announced that the facility would serve as"a post office for freight."

At that time, a trucker hauling a collection of smallfreight shipments would likely have to stop at as manypiers as there were categories of goods in his shipment.With the new facility, goods were taken from the piers toa series of loading bays along the 15th Street side.The goods would be sorted inside, then loaded into truckspulled into bays on the 16th Street side.Each truck would be loaded in a single trip.Once the trucks pulled out, both the Lincoln and HollandTunnels under the Hudson were nearby.

The Port Authority moved out in 1973, moving theirheadquarters to the World Trade Center complex.

The building was renovated as a carrier hotel by Taconicin the late 1990s.A major trunk of optic fibers from multiple carriers runsalmost directly under the building, making this one of themost important telecom carrier hotels on the East Coast.

Google was leasing space in the building.In 2010, they contracted to purchase the entire buildingfor what was reported to be around $1.9 billion.

The building now houses more than 30 global carriers.Internap advertiseshaving 6 MW of generator-backedelectrical power in their data center here.Telx advertises24 MW of generator power backing17 separate 4000-ampere 460-volt Con Edison feeds,building-wide.Yes, that is just over 31 megawatts.XO,Verizon, Sprint, Level 3,TelXand many other carriers operate here.

The ground floor houses a number of non-network businesses.A cancer center developed by St Vincent's Hospital has70,000 feet in a facility in the middle of the 15th Street side.That's down to the left in this picture.A Chase Bank branch is on the corner of 15th and 8th Avenue.

Banana Republic is a large commercial presence in thecenter of the 8th Avenue side, and there's a Citibankbranch at 8th Avenue and 16th Street.

Some large ventilation louvers are on the 15th Street side,where shipments used to arrive from the piers.

A Starbucks (of course) and a U.S. Post Office are on theNinth Avenue side.

Below is a view of 111 Eighth Avenue from the balcony ofthe Whitney Museum in the Meatpacking District.

811 Tenth Avenue

The AT&T Switching Center is at811 Tenth Avenue, the block along the west side ofthe avenue between 53rd and 54th Street.It's a windowless building 370 feet tall,with the antennas topping out at 440 feet.It is divided into 21 extra-high floors,the equivalent of 40 normal stories.It is the largest AT&T switching center in New York.

435 West 50th Street

435 West 50th Street between 9th and 10th Avenueswas an old Bell Telephone facility, as we see from itsvintage entryway below.

204 2nd Avenue

204 2nd Avenue at 13th Streetis a large switching center.It now has a Verizon FiOS shop on the ground floor,an unusual case of public sales in a telecommunicationsfacility.

A fire broke out in the building on the morning of February27, 1975.The building houses the Main Distribution Frame servinglower Manhattan and Brooklyn.The mainframe was destroyed and switching equipment was meltedor damaged by smoke.

This took out approximately 170,000 telephone lines.The Bell System brought mobile phone trucksto lower Manhattan to provide at leas some service.Full service was restored in about two weeks.

This was the largest loss of telephone service due to firein the U.S. until September 11, 2001, when 300,000 circuitswere disrupted and 10 cellphone towers destroyed.

Trains could be driven directly into the ground floor,which housed a rail yard, loading and unloading facilitiesfor trucks, warehouse area, and areas to display goods.It was in competition with another enormous building that isnow an Internet hub, the Google-owned811 Tenth Avenue.The railroad sold this building andthe rail lines were removed in 1966.

Lexent Metro Connect, Level 3, SBC SuperPoP,and Broadview operate data centers on the 4th and 6th floors.

A number of non-telecommunications companies operate inthe building, the largest is Tommy Hilfiger USA.Martha Stewart Omnimedia and Ralph Lauren's Club Monaco USare also prominent tenants.

51-55 Bethune Street

51-55 Bethune Street was the headquarters ofBell Telephone Laboratories before that moved to New Jersey.Bell Labs used this from 1868 through 1966.Chain broadcasting, the vacuum tube, and the transatlantictelephone system were invented here.Parts of The Jazz Singer, the first sound movie,were produced here.

In 1966-1970 it was converted into Westbeth,a complex for artists including subsidized housing andstudio and theatre space.

The High Line, a system of elevated rail lines, ran throughthe building on the third floor level.

The High Line, a system of elevated rail lines, ran throughthe building on the third floor level.The black and white picture is from 1936.

85 Tenth Avenue

85 Tenth Avenue was another industrial buildingconnected to the High Line.Here we are looking north on the new High Line Park,85th Tenth Avenue is on the left.

Now its 11 floors host several data centers, for zColo,both L-3 Communications and Level 3,Lexent Metro Connect, andTelehouse.

The High Line Park is built on the elevated rail bed.Here you see where a line branched off and entered thatbuilding.

Liquid Nitrogen Dewars

Liquid nitrogen,commonly referred to simply as LN₂, is acompact and easily transported source of very dry nitrogen.Handled carefully, it is a safer source than pressurized gas.

Containers of liquid nitrogen can solve problems associatedwith running telecommunication cables in moist environments.In other words, LN₂ can keep your wires(and fibers, and fiber repeaters) dry.

New York's Financial District is at the very southern tipof the island of Manhattan, in the narrow twisting streetsof old Nieuw-Amsterdam.There are huge numbers of telecommunications linesrunning through a small area just a few meters above thewater line, where the East River and the Hudson Riverjoin in New York Harbor.

So, in New Yorkit is pretty common to see containers of liquid nitrogensitting along the street.They're often chained to a streetlight pole.A small red rubber hose is duct-taped to the ground anddisappears into a manhole cover.

These two vacuum flasks of liquid nitrogen areon the sidewalk along Broadwaywhere it crosses John Street.

These two containers of liquid nitrogen are along Nassau Street,leading toward the New York Stock Exchangewhere the street's name changes to Broad Street.The NYSE is on the corner of Broad and Wall Streets,fronting on Broad.That's its columned front with the large American flagin the background.

There is a guard post just across the street, so theseDewars have 24/7 protection and aren't chained to anything.

Liquid nitrogen is a clear liquid that looks much like waterand is slightly less dense — 0.807g/mLor just 80.7% the density of water.It is, however, extremely cold.It boils at 77K(–195°C or –321°F).

You can see the frost built up on the top plumbing in theclose up view of these containers along Broadway.

A Dewar flask,named for the Scottish physicist and chemistJames Dewar who invented it in 1892,is a large vacuum flask used to store liquid nitrogen forperiods of days to a few weeks.A big flask for scientific and industrial applications isoften called a Dewar,while a small one for your coffee is often calleda Thermos.Generally speaking they're all vacuum flasks.

A vacuum between the inner and outer walls minimizesheat transfer.A small fraction of the liquid nitrogen boils off,holding the body of the liquid at 77K.Nitrogen expands by a factor of 1:694 going from theliquid to the gaseous phase, so the dewer must be unstopperedor, more likely, stoppered with a pressure relief value.

Most of the liquid nitrogen containers you see in Manhattanare down in the Financial District, but some make it toMidtown or even further north.Here are two at Fifth Avenue andEast 35th Street,a block north of the Empire State Building.

I've seen them as far north in Manhattan asLexington Avenue andEast 79th Street on theUpper East Side.

Hurricane Sandy, 2012

Hurricane Sandy was the largest Atlantic hurricaneon record as measured by diameter.It killed at least 253 people in seven countries along itspath, and caused losses estimated to be about $66 billionin damages and business interruption.

Hurricane Sandy developed out of a tropical storm in thewestern Caribbean Sea on October 22, 2012, and wasclassified as a hurricane on the 24th.An emergency was declared in New York on October 28th asthe hurricane approached, and the MTA and other masstransportation was shut down.MTA subway, bus and commuter rail was suspended startingat 7 PM on the 28th.The PATH rail service stopped at midnight on the 28th.All bus carriers at the Port Authority Bus Terminal closedat 3 AM on the 29th.

The hurricane moved ashore in New Jersey early on Monday,October 29.The New York Stock Exchange was closed for the 29th andthe 30th, the first two-day weather shut-down since theGreat Blizzard of 1888.

The hurricane happened to move ashore during a full moonperiod.The storm surge, the elevation in sea water level due tothe extremely low pressure accompanying the hurricane,coincided with the maximally high tides.This caused the storm surge to be about 14 feet abovethe average low water level.Many roadway and subway tunnels were flooded.The water level was well above ground level at subwaystations like South Ferry and Whitehall,meaning that the water could simply pour down thestaircases and flood the station and tunnels.

Electrical power was lost in Lower Manhattan at about4:30 PM on Monday, October 29, as subterranean vaultsholding transformers and distribution systems begantaking on water.

Basem*nts of buildings started flooding.By 8:30 PM Monday night, lobbies began taking on water inbuildings nearer the waterline.

The problem in a number of cases was that while the buildingdid have generators on a mezzanine or higher level and wellabove the water line, their diesel fuel was stored in tanksbelow ground level.The electrical pumps normally used to provide fuel for thegenerators were submerged.While there was fuel for the generators, it couldn't beelectrically pumped to them.

For example, the diesel generators at75 Broad Streetare on the 17th floor.The fuel tanks are in the basem*nt, and they and theirelectrical pumps were submerged.So, employees of operators using the Peer 1 data centerresorted to a bucket brigade, carrying 5-gallon bucketsof diesel fuel up 17 flights of stairs.

33 Whitehalland121 Varicklost power when their basem*nts flooded.Other sites, likeCoreSite/32 Avenue of the Americas,60 Hudson Street,and25 Broadwaystayed on line through the hurricane.

Con Ed was not able to begin restoring power due to floodedinfrastructure until Friday night, November 2nd,and at mid-day on Saturday, the 3rd,there were still areas without electrical power.

The pictures below are from over a week later,on the afternoon of November 11th.

The first problem was getting large portable generator setsto the New York area.Then, they had to be brought to Lower Manhattan.All of the road tunnels except the Lincoln Tunnel had beenclosed, and many of the bridges were closed as well.

There was the issue of getting adequate fuel for thegenerators, and even for the trucks hauling the generatorsand their fuel.Many of the streets in Lower Manhattan were closed,and traffic signals were inoperable even on ones thatwere open.

A building-fed fuel system malfunctioned at111 Eighth Avenue,cutting fuel to rooftop generators.Parts of the building rolled back to UPS systems,which were quickly exhausted.That facility also had problems with cooling,forcing some systems to be shut down.

Cool air, dry air, and fuel were all precious commodities.

A week later, some sandbags were still in place.Portable tanks had been brought in to hold water still beingpumped out of basem*nt areas, so the water wouldn't be pumpedout and immediately flow back in again.