Lower Manhattan Still A Mess 2 Weeks After Hurricane Sandy [PHOTOS]

By Angelo Young | November 14 2012 9:50 PM

Click image to enlarge and view gallery.

IBTimes/Angelo Young

A week after Hurricane Sandy, shops and restaurants in Manhattan’s Financial District remain either dangerous to enter (red), closed for necessary repairs (yellow) or open for business (green).
IBTimes/Angelo Young

Generator trucks parked on Wall Street provide power to some of the buildings a week after Hurricane Sandy.
IBTimes/Angelo Young

A truck with heating fuel is parked in front of the Love Street Coffee Truck, one of many micro-business food and beverage trucks that have quickly returned to serve the office workers from powered and opened buildings as well as the cleanup crews working on what is darkened, damp and/or damaged.
IBTimes/Angelo Young

A window cleaner wipes off Sandy’s grunge from a Starbucks at Hanover Square in Manhattan’s Financial District.
IBTimes/Angelo Young

One of many trucks pumping residual wastewater out of the collective flooded basement of the world’s financial capital. By Monday, most trucks seemed to have completed the first of many tasks at hand. Lower Manhattan’s subterranean world is not just intersected by subway lines, but is also filled with building sub-levels and electrical lines.
IBTimes/Angelo Young

One of many boilers and electrical boxes that will have to be replaced in the buildings of the flooded financial district of Manhattan.
IBTimes/Angelo Young

With downtown Brooklyn in the background, workers, some in hazmat suits, hauled ventilation equipment on Monday to the bottom level of a nearby skyscraper in Manhattan’s Financial District, two weeks after Hurricane Sandy.
IBTimes/Angelo Young

A residual wastewater tanker with a Michigan tag was parked on Monday near the end of FDR Drive in Manhattan’s financial district. Heavy trucks and light passenger vehicles, some pulling trailers of equipment, appeared to have come from as far away as Florida and Oklahoma to clean up the collective flooded basement of the world’s financial capital.
IBTimes/Angelo Young

A wall along South Street in Manhattan’s financial district remained an unrepaired hazard caused by Hurricane Sandy a week earlier.
IBTimes/Angelo Young

Portable toilets were lined up in front of the J.P. Morgan Chase building on Monday. Two weeks after Hurricane Sandy struck Manhattan’s Financial District, many of the typically bustling buildings were open only for inspectors and cleanup crews.

As storm-ravaged homeowners living on the coasts of New Jersey and New York City continue to pick up the shattered, waterlogged pieces of their lives, pumping out the basement of the world’s financial capital is only beginning. After that come the safety inspections, the mop-ups, the dry-outs and the replacement of massive boilers, electrical boxes and other assorted parts that make up the guts of a skyscraper.Not since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has the tip of Manhattan been so filled with cleanup crews and equipment. Buildings typically filled with office workers sit empty, many still running on minimal power supplied by generators inside or parked beside them.

“They have small generators in there right now,” said an electrician standing next to a Consolidated Edison Inc. (NYSE: ED) utility truck on Monday, pointing to one building on Hanover Square in the heart of the financial district (where the IBTimes offices are located.)

Inside, building staff wearing warm jackets in the chill worked in the dark, securing insurance waivers from office workers seeking to recover items they need to continue to work from home. Small generators were powering a few lights and two elevators. Guards with flashlights were escorting workers, two at a time, to darkened upper floors.“We need to remove the little generators to put in the temporary stuff in order to put in the permanent stuff,” said the ConEd worker. “Some people are being told not to return until after New Year’s.”