Aerial images from the U.S. Coast
Guard show the coastline in Brigantine, New Jersey, on Tuesday, October
30. Sandy struck land near Atlantic City, New Jersey, around high tide
Monday night.
(CNN) -- Sandy disrupted the lives of millions of people when it turned toward the Northeast United States and morphed into a superstorm. Most will return to their routine in time, but some lives are forever changed.
Among those people, here are three of their stories:
Emergency: A desperate rush to save lives in a hospital
The doctors, nurses and
staff at the New York University's Langone Medical Center acted fast
Monday evening when their hospital basement flooded, cutting off power
and the roof-top generators choked under Sandy's torrential rain.
When the power went out, the hospital staff went into action.
Ventilators giving newborns breath failed, lights dimmed and elevators in the 15-floor hospital stopped.
Dr. Andrew Brotman
described a desperate rush to find other hospitals to take their 260
patients and ambulances to take them there along streets flooded by the
superstorm.
The hospital was empty of
patients by 11 a.m. Tuesday, but Brotman and his colleagues were left
with the challenge of reclaiming it from Sandy's fury.
Rescue: Police chief aids hundreds who stayed behind
One of Ralph Verdi's
jobs as police chief of Little Ferry, New Jersey, is to make sure
residents heed warnings when danger approaches.
New Jersey was slammed hard. This is Atlantic City.
But many of the 10,000
residents who rode out Irene last year -- the first hurricane to make
landfall in New Jersey in 108 years -- might have seen Sandy as another
overhyped storm.
When Sandy lived up to
her billing and flooded Little Ferry and two neighboring towns, Verdi's
job became the rescue of residents trapped in the top floors and roofs
of their homes by 6-feet-deep water.
Rescuers under Verdi's direction scrambled to save a Bergen County woman who waved and shouted from her front porch.
The chief has been too
busy to count how many people have been whisked from rising water, but
he knew it was in the hundreds -- with many others, some in pajamas and
barefoot, calling for help.
Death: She answered the call of the sea and history
While the patients at Brotman's hospital and the people Verdi rescued all survived, Sandy took the life of Claudene Christian.
Claudene Christian was thrilled to be a part of the Bounty.
Christian, 42, was
living her dream as a deckhand on a replica of the historic HMS Bounty
before giant waves, churned up by Hurricane Sandy, overtook the
three-masted, 180-foot sailing vessel off North Carolina's coast early
Monday.
While 14 crew members
made it to lifeboats, waves washed Christian, Capt. Robin Waldridge and
another crew members overboard. The third crew member eventually swam to
a lifeboat.
The U.S. Coast Guard
staged a daring helicopter rescue: They flew into the hurricane's outer
bands and plucked the surviving crew members from two lifeboats.
Christian's body was later pulled from the sea, but Waldridge remained missing Tuesday.
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