Scenes from a storm

Hawthorne Street, Lynbrook

Courtesy Steve Grogan

Davison Avenue

Members of East Rockaway Fire Department waded to a fire in Bay Park.

Courtesy Heidi Mosier Chelius

Walking down the middle of 1st Avenue in Bay Park.

Mary Malloy/Herald

Canoeing on Adams Street, East Rockaway

Courtesy Siobhan Kearns

Central Avenue, Valley Stream

Clarissa Hamlin/Herald

Flooding on North Blvd.

Courtesy Briand Kraus

Westwood section of Lynbrook

WORKERS were out on Hempstead Avenue to repairing damaged power lines.

Clarissa Hamlin/Herald

Members of the East Rockaway Fire Department waded through floodwaters in Bay Park on the way to a reported house fire.

Courtesy Heidi Mosier Chelius

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Rhame Avenue

East Rockaway, NY 11518

Some said it wasn’t so bad, that it could have been worse — even those residents who were sitting in the dark with flooded basements but no electricity, their food spoiling, feeling lucky to have made it through Hurricane Irene without injury. Others, whose houses and vehicles had fallen victim to toppling trees, counted their blessings that they weren’t nearby at the time.

Irene was quickly downgraded to a tropical storm on Sunday after making landfall, but not before its lashing rains and high winds caused local flooding and brought down trees and power lines, leaving hundreds of thousands of Long Islanders without electricity.

By the time most residents awoke on Sunday, the rain had passed, but strong winds continued to blow throughout the day.

The Long Island Power Authority reported that at the height of the storm, 500,000 homes and businesses had no power. Customer-service centers were closed so workers could focus on repairs. Many of the outages were caused by trees falling on power lines. LIPA brought in repair crews from western states, but officials said they expected it to take several days to get the electricity back on for everyone.

Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus inservice was back to normal on Monday, but service on the Long Island Rail Road was limited, and still suspended entirely on the Long Beach and Far Rockaway branches as the workweek began.

East Rockaway

“Now I can check ‘Swimming up the street to put out a fire’ off my bucket list,” joked one East Rockaway volunteer firefighter after responding to yet another emergency call on Sunday morning.

About 50 Fire Department members manned firehouses around the village starting at 8 p.m. on Saturday, and they had a couple of unusual emergencies. “We got a call for a transformer down at 12:30 a.m. Sunday morning,” said Fire Chief Peter Chojnacki, “but it was really a house fire. … [W]e think it was the wires on the outside of the house that pulled out of [their] terminals and came in contact with an electric box.”