The Queens apartment I’ve called home for a decade sits two and a half miles away from the nearest body of surge-able water. My building has fortress strength and sits on a street that‘s slightly elevated.. Electricity never goes out (save for the city-wide blackout of 2003) and the scaffolding and trees that got taken down by Sandy in the immediate vicinity did little more than ruin a few cars.

The toll this storm has taken on people and infrastructure in surge zones is horrible. The water pushed onto this city’s river, ocean, bay and sound shoreline is unprecedented. It just so happened Sandy decided to come ashore as tidal heights were up another 20-percent or so above normal by the appearance of the once-a-month full moon.

Rain was a non-issue in the city. Less than an inch total. This storm was all about surge and for some the blistering wind. Those two components and the threat posed by them were predicted days in advance. The areas submerged Monday night appear on maps going back decades showing what territory is vulnerable to storm surge.

Some are using the historic strength of Sandy and its late-in-the-season appearance as evidence we have a man-made climate problem. That’s fine. We do. Global warming is so easy to see at this point it’s not worth choking on coal dust and fumes from S-U-V’s to argue about it.

The problem we have here is that the big one we’ve ducked for decades finally came. The severe damage to the region’s train and airplane infrastructure will make a speedy recovery impossible. Hundreds of thousands of lives in and around the city will be complicated by lack of electricity.

Without sounding matter of fact about it, this storm played out as a cross-section of weather experts and urban planners envisioned and feared. Those I know who choose to live in the most at-risk, near-the-water neighborhoods knew they could get flooded. The current mayor of New York City certainly knew the subway tunnels were at risk. He shut the system down well in advance.

None of the major political leaders with real pull in this region have blown anything that I can see. Mayor Mike has been a little too stoic in his assessments before and after the storm but I believe he does that to keep the citizenry in a sane frame of mind. There are probably lots of things he knows that he doesn’t share with us. But I believe in the guy’s ability to get this city going again.

NYC sanitation workers were pulling tree limbs off vehicles on my street at 9:30 AM today. The wind still had a howl to it.

City buses start to roll at 5 PM today. We’ll need trains and planes back before people can move in, out and about this great city.

Governor Cuomo said rebuilding should incorporate the notion we’ve entered a new era of wild, severe weather. State and federal government’s lack of money will make that difficult.