de retour apres une terrible tempete" Rain and Wind Created a Deadly Storm"

On the wall of a windowless auditorium in Manhattan, color-coded maps of the New York region filled two large screens, showing the Consolidated Edison customers who did not have electricity.

Ángel Franco/The New York Times
A vicious weekend storm tore through the metropolitan area, Dozens of tables, their surfaces covered by laptops and telephones, filled the room. The phones rang constantly, as if in a telethon. Information came from crews in the field on how quickly they were fixing downed lines. Every few hours, a staff meteorologist provided the latest forecast, and company officials updated each other on the number of hospitals, schools and nursing homes that were without power.

As the worst of the weekend storm passed through the area, Con Ed activated its emergency response center on the 19th floor of its headquarters on Irving Place. In the last three years, it had been used just twice: during a heat wave in 2008 and when a steam pipe exploded in Midtown the year before.

But Con Ed officials said neither of those emergencies compared to this storm, which they said was the worst in 30 years.

“We had in-house forecasts that something was going to converge with winds and rain, but we didn’t think it would be this much,” said John Miksad, who leads the response center. “On Saturday we staffed up, and I spent the day monitoring it, and the customer count kept going further and further. I had them check to make sure the numbers were right, they were so high.”

For most people in the New York metropolitan area, the storm’s damage was evident in the tangled branches, uprooted trees, homes without lights and towns evacuated as swollen rivers rose. But for Con Ed officials, the impact was told through numbers, as they watched the ticker of homes without power rise over the weekend.

With branches still lying on power lines and fallen trees littering thousands of area roads, about 200,000 customers were still without power on Monday in the metropolitan area.

Con Edison estimated that 55,000 customers had no power in Westchester ...........
more : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/16/nyregion/16storm.html?scp=1&sq=storm%20in%20Westchester&st=cse