Harricane Wrapup

Hello all,

This will be the final hurricane update because it is blue skys and going to be 80° here in New York today.

In the end, here at the broadcast center all we had was a number of roof leaks and all the sandbags we put out in the end were not necessary. We never lost electricity in the winds were not all that high.

The rest of New Jersey and on the NY shore were not so lucky.  There are more than a million people without power in the tri state area. This morning's commute took an extra 30 minutes as most of the streets I drive along between home and the office have flooding. There is even a section of Interstate 287 that has collapsed because a nearby stream undermined the road. The guard rails, the breakdown, lane and part of one lane is just gone. God knows how long it will take them to repair that damage.

At the house always had was one 40 min. power outage and no tree damage which was our greatest fear.

For those of you on the East Coast hopefully you had no more damage than we did. Tomorrow, I'm off to Los Angeles and hopefully the flooding will be all gone and cleaned up by the time I return.

Bob & Liz

My driveway this morning 

This was the traffic going to work on Saturday

Morning

My one bedroom studio apartment....  Well, it sure looks like my office.

8 pm update

The city is EMPTY - well...  no one is moving around

Broadcast Center door on 57th

Looking South down 11th Ave

Diner on 11th

Looking East up West 57th Street

The deck - now cleared

Saturday Evening Update

Hello everyone and welcome to hurricane prep central.

Sand Bags in the basement

56th Street

The rain is of and on as bands of it swing in off the coast. I arrived around 1 PM and we had our 1st meeting of the day. As I said in a previous post we are not that far above sea level so in the basement areas we have laid in a whole bunch of sand bags and plastic.

57th Street

Outside on both 57th St. and 56th St. we also place sandbags because when the rain is very very heavy the water runs down 57th St. and jumps the curb and tends to flow into the building. This is the 1st time we tried this technique for heavy rain will see if it works.

Everyone has seen large satellite dishes and we have our share of the them on the roof. The pointing angle for most of the satellites are about 45° above the horizon but in heavy winds you take the satellite dishes and you try to point them straight up in the air looking like a very large soup bowl. The wind survivability of the dish pointed like that is in excess of 120 mph which thank God we are not expecting here in New York.

The rear dish is still pointed at a satellite, the front is ready for the wind

One of our uplinks

The deck update

This is what it looks like when you take all the stuff off the deck and move it into the house!!

Saturday Morning at Home

Liz, Joseph and I are running around moving and tying down everything loose around the house.  I never thought about all the plants on the deck!!

This morning it's 75 degrees with some fog and not a breath of wind.  We had a little rain last night, nothing todo with Irene.  The ground is SOAKED, over the last week or so any rain causes puddles not only on the driveway but in the middles of the lawn - it can not take in any more water.

Irene will hit as a weak cat 1 or a tropical storm, that's fine with me.  For work thou it's the storm piling lots of water into the Hudson river at high tide.

I'm off to work at noon or so - more posts later

Bob

Friday Hurricane Work

Hello all,

Well is 4:45 PM on Friday afternoon the sun is out it's about 80°, and the weather is actually very very nice. And yes it will all go to crap in less than 24 hours.

The CBS broadcast Center is a large building, approximately 750,000 ft.², on the west side of Midtown Manhattan. We are between 11th Ave. and 10th Ave., 57th St. and 56 Street so we do occupy all but one small portion of an entire city block. Is the home for various distribution and production entities, including CBS News CBS Sports the local television station WCBS Channel 2. We also do productions for BET, Inside Edition, and several syndicated talk shows. On any day there are somewhere between 2000 and 2500 people working in the complex. Across the street is the home of several of our productions, mostly production offices, and there's another 200,000 ft.² of space there. We also do the distribution for the CBS television networks from the building.

Shot today from the West corner of 11th Ave and 57th street

Looking further up the block, 57th street

Closeup of more of the dishes

We have lots of generator capacity and a very large uninterruptible power supply so from a power standpoint were pretty self-sufficient. But, as you can see from the pictures we have a lot of junk bolted to the roof 30 some satellite dishes along with very large air-conditioning equipment.

The one thing that has kept us very busy today if you see any of the news, as are expecting a storm surge to come up the Hudson River. The Hudson is a small block away from our 11th Ave. and of the building. We are only approximately 14 feet above sea level. Therein lies our most interesting set of problems for the hurricane. I intend on shooting of number of pictures of which I will post some here over the next day and a half. I will be spending the weekend living here at the broadcast center while I conduct various meetings to ensure the viability of the broadcast center for all of our customers who work out of the building.

The best comment was from the CFO for the news division yesterday “does anybody remember the last time we had an earthquake and a hurricane in the same week in New York City?”

That pretty well sums up the fun I think we're going to have.

Bob