Red Hook, N.Y. Upstairs, Hope of Safety; Downstairs, Flotsam By CARA BUCKLEY Robert Stolarik for The New York Times The waters in Red Hook, Brooklyn, rose so violently, so fast, on Monday night that the streets changed from being spattered with rain to being under six feet of water in what seemed like minutes. It lapped staircases, rose half a story high and chased people to upper floors, where they huddled in darkness because the power had gone out. Cars were bobbing like corks down Van Brunt Street, at the mouth of New York Harbor. Roseann Marabello, 34, and her father, Mario Marabello, 62, tried to leave their Van Brunt row house as the floodwaters roared in at 7:45 p.m. Monday, but their Ford Escape was swept up by the rising tide. They jumped out and swam through the frigid, black torrent back home, where they scrambled to the upper floors as water nipped at their heels. At 10:30 p.m., Barry O’Meara waded through floodwaters to check on his bar, the Bait and Tackle. He wrested open the door to find three feet of water and a 300-pound log, used as a foot rest at the bar, charging its way out. Metal cellar doors were pried open to reveal basements brimming with brown green brackish water, thick with a flotsam of bottles, stools and kegs. The air reeked of fuel oil. Sump pumps were underwater, but there was no electricity anyway and few people had generators. At Fort Defiance, a restaurant and bar also on Van Brunt, water was still gushing through the basement walls, and the owner, St. John Frizell, said his compressors and refrigerators were assuredly ruined. Susan Povich, owner of the Red Hook Lobster Pound, frantically tried to find a home for $50,000 worth of lobster meat packed in ice in the walk-in freezer. Her generator had two hours left. “I’ve lost my whole business,” she said.

East Hampton, N.Y. A Road Disappears, and a Body Is Discovered By SARAH MASLIN NIR Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times The blue skies over East Hampton on Tuesday were clear of any trace of a hurricane. Only the balmy breeze, heady with the scent of fir, elm and maple sap hinted at the storm’s destruction; it came from scores of toppled trees and hundreds of snapped branches. Many limbs yanked down telephone and electrical wires as they fell; some crashed into houses. On Cooper Lane in East Hampton, crews with chain saws tackled felled trees, including one, more than 40 feet tall, that toppled when the wind kicked up the day before. Underneath it was 33 Cooper Lane, its roof smashed. “I felt a shudder in the house, and it came down,” said Taylor Smith, who lives a few doors down. As of Monday afternoon, more than 40,000 people from Southampton to Montauk, at the very tip of Long Island , were without power, according to the Long Island Power Authority . On Georgica Beach, a passer-by made a grisly discovery on Tuesday morning: the body of a woman, washed up on the beach. The woman has not been identified. West Lake Drive, on the edge of Long Island Sound in Montauk, was unrecognizable. The road, buckled in parts, could not be seen; it was completely covered in thick sand and rubble. Boats in Montauk Harbor, which had floated to the top of the pilings as the water rose several feet overnight, straining their moorings, had settled back down with the tide. Two police cars guarded the foot of Gerard Drive, a spindly 1.5-mile-long cape bounded by Gardiners Bay on one side and Accabonac Harbor on the other. Every few minutes, residents drove up, anxious about the fate of their homes. Every house still stood, the police said, but it was not safe to return: the peninsula had been breached, and parts of the road were washed out. “You come down here and you just don’t know if there is going to be a house,” said Mary Trabona, after the police had confirmed that her childhood home was still standing, “or if the bay will have reclaimed it.”

East Village, N.Y. Cellars Filled With Rain and a Car Engine Flooded By JOHN LELAND Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times The water that made rivers of Avenues C and D receded on Tuesday, and the East Village was a mixture of disaster and nonchalance. A group of young men in pajama pants and shorts threw a football on East 12th Street, while workers pumped the basement of CHP Hardware on Avenue C and Eighth Street. Curiosity seekers took to the walkway over the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive to take photographs of yellow earthmovers pushing mud, debris and water from the otherwise empty highway. At the towering brick Jacob Riis Houses on Avenue D, Yaritza Hernandez, 30, a medical assistant, stood over her 1992 Toyota Camry , looking at an engine block covered in grass and leaves from the flood water. Memory had worked against her. “I parked the same place during Irene, and nothing happened,” Ms. Hernandez said. About 30,000 people live in mandatory evacuation zones in the East Village and on the Lower East Side, said Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh of the 74th District, who was checking in on residents at Haven Plaza, a federally subsidized complex on Avenue C and 13th Street, just below the site of an explosion at a Consolidated Edison substation on East 14th Street. The water level at Haven Plaza was nearly waist high on the first floor Monday night. “Most of them stayed,” Mr. Kavanagh said. Allen Settle, 29, who lives in a subsidized building called the Glass Factory at 139 Avenue D, said he never got word to evacuate because he did not own a television. He was streaming the sitcom “Monk” on his computer and talking on the phone when the power went out. “My friend said I should go to a bar,” said Mr. Settle, a Columbia student, “but when I went down to the courtyard the water was a couple feet high.”

Staten Island, N.Y. With No Choice, Taking Leap From Roof to Floating Roof By KIRK SEMPLE Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times Pedro Correa, 36, and Robert Gavars, 35, stood on the edge of a sodden field in the Oakwood section of Staten Island and assessed their luck. The area before them was littered with parts of houses, including Mr. Correa’s. When the storm struck on Monday, his home had been about 500 yards farther east. So had the two men. Earlier Monday, Mr. Correa, who has lived in the neighborhood for six years, had evacuated his family to Brooklyn . But he and Mr. Gavars, a close friend, returned to Mr. Correa’s house to set up a generator. When they tried to leave about 7 p.m., their car stalled in high water. So they decided to ride out the storm at the house, a two-story building. But the surge began to swallow it. They scrambled to the top floor, but within 15 minutes the water level went from ankle-high to chin-high. They broke the legs off a dining room table and tried to use the tabletop to float, but that did not work. A neighbor’s house had been knocked off its foundation and began floating by, so they leapt to its roof from Mr. Correa’s house. It was pitch black and they had no idea where they were, but they sensed they were heading inland. After perhaps 45 minutes, they dropped from the roof and used boards to push themselves through debris and 15-foot-deep water to higher land. “Somebody opened up a door in a house and we sat there for a while,” said Mr. Correa, a correction officer at Sing Sing prison and an Army veteran. “I made it through Iraq , I made it through the World Trade Center,” he said, “but I didn’t think I’d make it through this.”