With Hurricane Irene quickly being downgraded to a tropical storm shortly after coming ashore in New York Sunday morning, early reports indicated that a near record storm surge, widespread flooding, and massive power outages notwithstanding, things could have been much worse.
“Long Beach is probably the worst hit,” said Chabad-Lubavitch Rabbi Eli Goodman, director of Chabad of the Beaches in Nassau County, whose apartment fronts the currently churning waters of the Atlantic Ocean. “There’s big time water going down my street, and I don’t know what’s going on with the synagogue, although its basement floods easily.”
Goodman, who evacuated with his family on Friday and headed to the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, got updates throughout the morning. He was waiting for authorities to give the all clear so that he could make his way back.
As the highest winds were recorded on that section of Long Island, the rabbi noted that as far as he could tell, people in Long Beach still had power.
“A few people are still there and are watching my apartment for me,” he said. “As soon as people can get out into the streets, we’re going.”
Near Coney Island, which was evacuated in advance of the storm, officials at Chabad of Sea Gate reported that everyone they knew was okay.
With the exception of North Carolina’s outer banks, which bore the brunt of Irene’s hurricane-force winds when it made its first landfall on Friday, and in isolated fatal cases of falling tree limbs, accounts up and down the East Coast spoke of inconvenience more than danger. It helped that in most places, people heeded evacuation orders.
“We dodged a bullet,” Police Chief David Wolfson of Margate, N.J., which clocked maximum winds of 56 miles per hour, told the Reuters news agency.
CNN estimated that as many as 3 million people were without power, and that 11 fatalities could be contributed to Irene since Friday.
Among those without power were thousands in and around Wilmington, N.C., a port city hours from where Irene made landfall.
Rabbi Moshe Lieblich, director of Chabad of Wilmington, said that the weather got bad just before the onset of the Sabbath Friday night. The winds picked up after midnight, and the power at his home and synagogue went out at about 4 a.m.
“We’re still without power,” the rabbi said on Sunday from his home. “But the electricity came back on at the Chabad House.”
Lieblich was transferring food from his fridge and those of community members to the one at the Chabad House to head off spoilage, and anticipated that things would quickly return to normal this week.
“At this point, people are recovering,” he said. “The storm wasn’t as bad as advertised. Trees are down. Wires are down. But it’s over and behind us.”
At the University of Delaware, which shut down on Thursday just days before the start of classes, dozens of freshmen were stranded in their dorms after arriving to the school without knowing of the administration’s plans. About 60 Jewish students sought refuge and hot meals at the Chabad House run by Rabbi Eliezer and Roni Sara Sneiderman.
“We facilitated a Sabbath dinner for 60 people who would have had no place else to go,” reported the rabbi. “The dining hall wasn’t open, and most everyone at the university went home. But we live here.”
Sneiderman said that things didn’t get really bad until Saturday night, when blowing wind and heavy rain knocked down a tree, flooded his basement with about an inch of water, and leaked through the ceiling. He was prepared for much worse.
“We just wanted to be on the safe side,” he said. “We were very happy to share our home in the storm.”
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