There are a few critical infrastructure buildings in NYC that kind of have to work. Two of them are highlighted here in this article. Another one is Google's bu

There are a few critical infrastructure buildings in NYC that kind of have to work. Two of them are highlighted here in this article. Another one is Google's building on 16th and 9th ave which is a major carrier hotel (not far from the Hudson river). Unfortunately, as the article points out, many of these buildings are downtown literally mere blocks from water. Most of the building outages including NYU Med, Bellvue Hospital and others were due to backup generators and/or diesel tanks being located in the basement and getting flooded. Remarkably, though, for the rest of us in unaffected areas things just work. I'm writing from Morningside Heights by Columbia Uni and we are fine. I've spent time on 96th and Park and things are fine there as well. The only noticeable issue is routing voice calls. SMS is mostly ok except for the occasional failure. I drove downtown into the power outage areas and noticed that my AT&T phone lost service while my Verizon phone stayed up. Downtown south of 30th or so, depending on where you are west/mid/east, is still a bad place to be. It is really interesting to see the city divided between the powered haves and have nots. Lots of people have been migrating north and staying with friends uptown or in the outer boroughs. Daylight brings downtown sortees to pack bags and bring out refugees or bring in supplies. Tuesday was the best day to do this. Yesterday, Wed., was a traffic nightmare. With mass transit out of it everyone decided to drive in. Coupled with the traffic lights being out in half the city traffic was just out of control. Google traffic maps were a sea of red. Today only cars with three or more people in them will be allowed into Manhattan. The only silver lining in this entire Sandy catastrophe was that she was not a great rainmaker. That would have been calamitous.