@drfranvoglerDr. Fran Vogler
NEW YORK: NYC mass transit shutdown begins, final scheduled subway, bus runs to take 8 hours:apne.ws/n48ZiL #hurricane #irene #NYIrene
NEW YORK (AP) -- The city's mass transit system began its first shutdown brought on by a natural disaster Saturday, and the area's five airports stopped accepting arriving flights as Hurricane Irene approached.
Final scheduled runs on all subway and bus lines started at noon, and it would take about eight hours before the system would be shuttered, city officials said. The systems can't operate in sustained winds higher than 39 mph and shutting down is a precaution, the transit authority said.Some subways were nearly empty early Saturday morning, as were bridges and streets as New Yorkers heeded warnings about approaching Hurricane Irene.
As the day wore on and the noon hour struck, still more than a dozen people hopefully waited for trains at the Seventh Avenue station in Brooklyn's Park Slope section."What I'm hoping is that they will run trains for the next hour or two to pick up the stragglers," said Kate Sandberg, 34, of Brooklyn. She said she was headed to the Williamsburg neighborhood to visit a friend and had been waiting 20 minutes for a train.Trains did to continue to come through the stations unloading passengers after the noon hour struck.Waiting at the same station, Randall Moore, 29, of Brooklyn said he'd gotten turned around on the system, gotten on the wrong train while headed to Queens from Harlem in Manhattan and was now hoping that he hadn't missed the last train going back toward his destination."The real problem once I get there is how I get back to 125th Street," he said. "I'm really hoping someone will give me a ride."
