I left Swampscott a little before 10 am headed for Long Island to visit Justin and Carla. After getting back on the Massachusetts Turnpike outside of Boston, I stopped for gas and to grab some munchies and stuff for the rest of the drive. While I was there, I got a call from my friend John, who I worked with here in San Diego back in 2001. I wasn't sure if I'd get to visit with him because he was working, but he called and said this day was a good day, so he gave me directions to a stop just off I-84 in Danbury, Connecticut, where we could meet for lunch.
Thanks to mostly good traffic, I got through Hartford and to Danbury at around 1:30 pm. John got there at about the same time and we went to a restaurant for lunch and to swap work stories. In the meantime, a line of storms rolled through and dumped mostly heavy rain where we were, but they moved through eventually. I didn't expect to be able to make it through that, anyway, so we chatted for a long time and I didn't get out of Danbury until after 4 pm.
At that point, I had to decide pretty quickly how I was going to get to Long Island. Justin mentioned taking the ferry, but I was too chicken to try to find that "blind." The smart thing was just to follow the signs to Long Island, but I hadn't done that before and didn't like the idea of slogging through the City in heavy rain. Or, for that matter, Newark on the Garden State Parkway.
So I ended up driving around on I-287...all the way around Newark and coming out on the south side of the action.
Naturally, that was where the storms also went. Heavy rain kind of sat down in the Staten Island area, the area of New Jersey just west of there, and Brooklyn. By the time I got within a few miles of where I-287 crossed the Garden State and the New Jersey Turnpike, the sky was dark, the rain was heavy, the road was flooding, and the traffic was stopped. That was at about 7 pm. It took about an hour to cover those couple of miles across the Garden State and the Turnpike and into Perth Amboy. From there, traffic improved a little getting across the Outerbridge Crossing into Staten Island. There was a little congestion approaching the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, but we got onto it OK and about halfway across at around 8:45 pm, where traffic came to a dead crawl. The rain had pretty much stopped by then, but it took about two hours to crawl across the rest of the bridge and into Brooklyn on the Belt Parkway, which had flooded in several places. We probably averaged about two miles an hour. The first hour, it was hard to tell what exactly had happened, but by the time we got into Brooklyn, there were several abandoned cars just left in lanes on the Parkway. After a while, I stopped counting, but there had to have been at least 8 or 10 of them in one land or another.
Finally, we got to the Flatbush Avenue exit, which was still mostly submerged. After two hours of drying and draining, two of the three eastbound lanes had cleared, but it was the longest wait I can remember like that.
After that, the traffic opened up and we got all the way to the JFK Airport area in about five minutes, where the last car wreckage took a couple of minutes to get around.
I finally got to the Southern State Parkway and West Babylon at around 11:30 pm.
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Last Revised: 18 August 2004
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