The trains were for transportation out of Manhattan and Long Island only. But the going was slow. Vast lines of travelers had been formed along Seventh and Eighth Avenues around 33rd Street, waiting for hours to enter Penn Station.
The trains were efficient and available to move people out of the city on a continuing basis, and the executives of Amtrak and the major New York bus corporations were summoned to City Hall to coordinate and manage the operations.
A massive complex — a refugee camp of sorts — was set up in the hills of New Jersey, west of the horse country around Far Hills. It was a former Army base and the huts were still waterproof. By Monday evening, 100,000 Guards and Troops were on duty, assisting with the evacuation from New York City.
The nearest New York came to full-blooded riots was, curiously, at truck hire corporations, which were attempting to quadruple the usual prices. The companies had no way of knowing if they would ever see their trucks or vans again in the face of the oncoming disaster, but locals saw it as naked price-gouging, a cynical exercise in ripping off frightened citizens. Three hooligans actually set fire to one rental operation on the Lower East Side, torching the office and three vans. The fire department didn’t make it in time to salvage them, and the National Guardsmen who arrived quickly on the spot had little sympathy for the owners.
The Police Chief and the Mayor moved in immediately and made price increases illegal, adding that if van rental corporations no longer wished to conduct business, that was fine too, empowering the National Guard, in the same breath, to sequester all trucks in the city.
They came a few hours too late for a more serious riot on the lower West Side when hundreds of fleeing people became enraged at the asking price of $1,000 a day for a compact-sized van. They stormed the office, overpowered the four assistants, smashed the windows, seized the keys hanging on a cork board at the rear of the counter, and made off with twenty-six vans.
Again, there was nothing much the Police could — or would — do. They were working in squadrons with the Army, systematically clearing out residential blocks, helping people with their possessions, issuing exit instructions from the city. More and more National Guardsmen were being ferried in from Upstate New York to help with the compulsory evacuation.
And their task was mammoth, especially in Midtown and the Upper East Side where so many residential apartment blocks were crowded close together, on all streets from 57th Street, north to Sutton Place, First, Second, and Third Avenues. Not so much the more commercial strips of Lexington and Madison, but on the densely residential Park Avenue, and, of course, the east side of Fifth Avenue.
Almost all visitors to the city were either gone or on their way, having been advised at the end of the previous week to leave without delay. The Mayor ordered the Police and the Army to seize the bus corporations in order to ferry thousands of tourists out to the airports.
Officials alerted foreign governments to the imminent disaster, and informed every U.S. embassy, worldwide, that all visitors were now banned from flying to any airport on the East Coast. They requested foreign airlines to bring in extra aircraft, empty, to assist with the transportation of tourists out of JFK, Newark, and La Guardia. Inbound aircraft with passengers were diverted to Toronto to refuel and return home.
The Port of New York was closed, except to outgoing ships, which were redirected south — unless you particularly wanted your big cruise liner or freighter to end up in Times Square.
All businesses not directly involved in transportation were closed — commercial or retail, the service industry, tourist attractions and places of entertainment. Schools, colleges, and universities.
The objective was partly to drastically reduce the amount of routine traffic on the streets of the city in order to provide space for the Army and Police, who were dispatching truckloads of important government and commercial documents stored in Manhattan by the big corporations.
The closing of shops and stores caused another specter to rear its snarling head in the planning offices of Tammany Halclass="underline" the chilling recollection of the Big Blackout in the summer of 1977 when a massive power failure plunged the city into almost total darkness. It had taken the criminal element about ten minutes to realize all the lights were out and the burglar alarms silenced, and several thousand looters and rioters went into immediate action. By first light, they had broken into stores citywide and stolen millions of dollars worth of merchandise.
The situation at hand was not quite that serious. There was plenty of electric power, and many extra thousands of Police and National Guard on duty. And looters themselves had to fear for their lives. Nonetheless, the great empty neighborhoods of New York City and stores full of merchandise would be standing unattended, tempting nefarious characters far and wide.
The police presence tended to gather in full force in certain areas, moving as one large unit from block to block, leaving desolate areas in their wake. Two serious break-ins along West 34th Street near Macy’s department store alerted the authorities, and the armed National Guard were moved into the silent areas the moment they arrived in the city.
Police cars drove slowly along the streets, loudly informing anyone who was listening that this was now a designated no-go area, closed to pedestrians and private cars, unless on official business. The cold-blooded warning was loud and clear: LOOTERS WILL BE SHOT. This was as close to martial law as it was possible to get, but the Service Chiefs had been adamant — there is only one way to run an operation like this…rigid rules, and ruthless application of those rules. Citizens must learn to do precisely as they are told. Instantly. And not to step out of line. That’s the only way we can get this done.
The guidelines on the desk of the New York City Mayor had come directly from the White House, from the all-powerful Adm. Arnold Morgan, and refined by the Chiefs of Army Staff in the Pentagon. There was to be no arguing, no discussion, no interruptions, no alternative plan. This was strictly military. These were orders, not suggestions…DO IT! AND DO IT NOW!
Generally speaking, it was working. There had been some dissent and attempted robberies at first, but the sight of the perpetrators who were caught, bundled into the back of an Army truck, and driven off to God knows where had a steadying effect on anyone else with similar ambitions.
The police worked around the clock, aiding, protecting, urging people along the way. On the Upper East Side, elderly former chief executives and various New York dowagers found it was too much to ask to be separated from a precious painting or valuable items of furniture, and refused to leave without them. Most New York cops were understanding, the more so since these people usually had two or three automobiles at their disposal, plus chauffeurs, and were more than happy to make them available to help with the evacuation.
An acute problem was the number of prisoners and guards under supervision of the New York City Department of Corrections, which was currently holding 19,000 inmates, plus a staff of just over 10,000 uniformed officers, and 1,500 civilians. The City Department ran ten holding facilities on Rikers Island — a building around the size of the Kremlin, which sat in the middle of the East River — including two floating detention centers docked off the northern tip of Rikers in an old converted Staten Island ferry. This was, of course, a site unlikely to have much of a long-term future once Admiral Badr drew a bead on the Cumbre Vieja — it stood an outstanding chance of being flattened and simply swept away by the tidal wave.
There were six other jails run by the Department, one in Manhattan and one in Queens, two in Brooklyn, and two more in the Bronx, one of which was an 800-bed barge moored on the south side. The New York City Chief of Police had immediately decided on the early release of those detainees that he judged unlikely to represent much of a future danger to the public, and those unable to post bail. The rest were being transferred to jails in Upstate New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, under armed guard, on trains in which security was somehow more manageable than on the open highway.