A thriving New York community turned into a blackened wasteland

Looking at the smouldering remnants, twisted steel frames and corrugated iron sheets it is perhaps difficult to tell. But before America's biggest ever storm wrought its carnage, the desolate and burning wasteland of Breezy Point was a thriving seaside community in New York City.

This is a neighbourhood of Queens, where, in the early hours of yesterday, up to 100 homes were destroyed in a fire triggered by Hurricane Sandy. The image, almost post-apocalyptic in its bleakness, captures the ferocity unleashed by a storm that has left much of America's eastern seaboard, in chaos.

"We were spared," said one Queens resident, Tom de Maria, as he passed by the remains in Breezy Point. "But all these people have lost their homes. It's crazy. I've never seen anything as bad as this."

As dawn broke in New York on Tuesday the devastation was only just becoming clear. Streets usually teeming with workers and tourists were instead littered with fallen trees, scattered debris and cars floating in water. Swathes of the southern tip of Manhattan and the edges of Brooklyn suffered severe damage following a 13-foot storm surge that overwhelmed low-lying areas. A city that has so often provided the backdrop for disaster movies was left resembling the set of one.

Some of the best-known streets in the world - Fifth Avenue and Broadway - were silent and empty; millions of residents were without power; and subway tunnels were flooded. But it was across the East River in Breezy Point where Sandy left its most devastating mark. Firemen told how the storm's unrelenting 80mph winds caused one house fire to spread along entire streets, obliterating dozens of family homes.

"The whole neighbourhood's gone," said Arthur Holstrom as he surveyed the scene.

The air was filled with the acrid smell of smoke as some homes still smouldered, and personal belongings were strewn everywhere. No one is yet sure what started the blaze. One theory is that a gas pipe ruptured and exploded in one house and the wind blew embers from house to house. All the properties were wooden.

Pat Lennon of Rockaway Point Fire department was one of almost 200 firemen who fought the blaze for hours. "It went from house to house real quick," he said. His uniform and face covered in dirt and ash, he said with understatement that it had been "a bad night".

It was still unclear whether anybody died in the fire, but some people in the neighbourhood had ignored mandatory evacuation calls and had to be rescued. Tom and Kathleen Owens and their children were among those who chose to stay. When waves pummelled the house next door, and its foundations collapsed, they quickly changed their minds. "Suddenly the house was two feet away and then it slammed into ours," Mr Owens said. "It was terrifying, I was praying."

Rescue and fire services got them out, carrying the children into an inflatable boat. New Yorkers were left surveying wreckage all across the city yesterday. Lower Manhattan, one of its most recognisable areas, was severely hit.

At the entrance of an underground garage, just yards from Wall Street, crowds gathered to take photographs of five cars, their roofs only just visible above the floodwater, which sat piled on top of each other. The vehicles appeared to have been deposited in a heap by water surging inland from the nearby East River.

Just a few hundred yards away is the Brooklyn-Battery tunnel that links downtown Manhattan with Brooklyn. It has a clearance of 12ft 7in, but Tuesday morning it was filled to the brim with floodwater. At the entrance ramp, barely visible, was the outline of a submerged van.

As people took pictures, a young man in a high-visibility vest peered over a railing. "Damn," he said. "That ain't where I parked it." The man, whose vest identified him as a member of the city's Bridge Operations unit, said he had parked a van at each end of the tunnel the previous evening to stop traffic entering, but floodwater had dragged the van almost 20 yards from where he had left it.

Near the tunnel was Franklin D Roosevelt Drive, one of the busiest routes in New York City. On Tuesday, it was an eerie stretch of desolate highway. The cobbled streets of South Street Seaport in lower Manhattan were still partly underwater yesterday. Residents told how the water had risen from the East River and surged through the streets before subsiding.

On first sight, many of the bars and shops looked to have escaped major damage, but upon closer inspection the interiors were wrecked, presumably by floodwater that had since subsided. Debris littering the street told the tale, with coffee sachets, clothing and even a pair of mannequins scattered around.

On Maiden Lane in the Financial District, Leslie Lindsey, 36, watched late into the night as water from the East River poured into the Manhattan streets. "The street was a river," she said. "I could hear people screaming and saw cop cars reversing up the street as the water started pouring up the road."

Pointing to a nearby car, which had a tree on its roof, she said: "The water was above the cars. It came all the way up the street and into the lobby of my building. I'm on a high floor, but my car is in the garage and it's still under six feet of water. Just seeing that much water pouring towards us was frightening; really scary. But I think we will be lucky because we live close to Wall Street. We'll probably get our power back on before a lot of others."

Among the most pressing concern of New Yorkers is the return of the subway. The city's transport hub was suspended on Sunday night with the hope that it would reopen by today at the latest. Now it looks unlikely that it will reopen even by the end of the week as many downtown stations are submerged. "It feels like we are cut off from the rest of the city," Miss Lindsey said.

Residents of lower Manhattan have had much to contend with. The area still bears the scars of September 11, which took place just a few blocks from the worst-hit area of flooding. Now it will undergo another rebuilding. It is a testament to the city that the clean-up effort was already beginning yesterday morning. Refuse collectors and other city officials toured lower Manhattan clearing the streets of debris and attempting to secure smashed storefronts.

Mary Burke, who lives on John Street, said: "When you've been through something like 9/11 this is crisis-light," she smiled, before joking: "But when you consider what we've been through I sometimes think maybe I should move. It seems like you pay a serious toll living here."