It Is not often that you can cel-ebrate your birthday during the largest Atlantic hurricane on re-cord, but one Kingston student braved the storm for his birthday pint.

Amir Taghan, a second year film studies student and recently 21, travelled to New York with his two older brothers to celebrate his birth-day. What Amir didn’t anticipate was Hurricane Sandy joining the party too.

“My flight was one of the last to arrive in Newark Airport on the Sun-day before Sandy hit, the rain was al-ready falling heavily, but as we piled into the closest yellow cab the cabbie

told us it was going to get worse as the night went on,” Amir explained.

“The day before the storm hit we decided to go to Times Square, walk-ing around Times Square there was a weird sense that something really bad was going to happen, it’s really hard to describe but everyone was on the edge of their seat if you know what I mean,” he said.

For Amir’s actual birthday on the Monday, while city wide evacuations were underway, they were fortunate enough to be able to stay in their ho-tel room for the night.

Amir said: “We were staying at the Wellington Hotel in Manhattan. We could hear the power of the wind and rain outside and we were following live updates on our TV of the carnage

being caused by Sandy.”One of the most reported incidents

of damage that Hurricane Sandy caused was the crane that was dan-gling precariously from 90 stories high in Manhattan. Amir was on the street below it when the crane first began to collapse.

“The crane which partially col-lapsed was two blocks behind our hotel and I was on the street as it happened.

“The noise was deafening when it first broke. Apparently it wasn’t fastened down properly, so it was a combination of human error and Sandy that caused it to flip over.

“The atmosphere around the crane was a really weird one, every-one was expecting something really

bad to happen. There’s was a lot of people looking up at it and hoping it wouldn’t fall as wind picked up and made it start to sway.

“There was nothing the emergency services could do except cordon off the streets below. The building the crane was on was still being built which meant it had no walls, and the higher you got the stronger the wind got. All they could do was watch it over night and hope it didn’t fall,” Amir told The River.

The crane was finally secured six days later after being left to dangle there as emergency services strug-gled to cope with the magnitude of the disaster.

However the city that never sleeps truly earned its name during

Hurricane Sandy. The tubes were down for the first

time in living memory, and the iconic yellow cab had become a rare sight, but New York’s bars stayed open every night after the storm.

Amir said: “The nightlife was still very much booming. Due to peo-ple becoming stranded there was a sense of people coming together.

“Bars were open pretty much all the time, even the bars in lower Manhattan that had lost power still opened their doors. They got live music and used candles to light the place.

“It was a once in a lifetime experi-ence.

“I don’t think I’ll ever experience New York like that again.”

A fAncy dress shop in Kingston town centre was left in ruins when a fire broke out in the offices above the store.

Eight fire engines as well as police and am-bulances put out the blaze above the popular dress-up shop Partica.

Around 150 people

were moved to safety and 40 fire fighters were called to tackle the blaze on Fife Road on Novem-ber 5.

The store will be set up in a new location and will be open by Novem-ber 26 with an open-ing offer of 20% off for customers.

8 THE RIVER - NEWSwww.riveronline.co.uk

A 21st birthday with Sandy

By Alex Sunier

Cyclists make motorway mishapsports science students, tom Leaney, David Holby and sam now-lan, cycled to paris in three days and reached their goal of raising £1,009 for Momentum.

Tom Leaney, 21, said: “We didn’t plan at all. The only thing we planned was the ferry. We just followed signs to Paris, we didn’t have a clue where we were going as we ended up cy-cling 40 miles out of our way and ended up on the motorway.

“The police found us and gave us a list of villages to go through to get to Paris. It was really rewarding when we were finally outside the Eiffel Tower, it felt like an achievement.”

The rugby boys set off at 4am on the October 29 with the University’s

cycling society and the Kingston Cou-gar following them to Newhaven, Brighton to lead them out.

The participating students chose Momentum as they found it was a good cause for terminally ill children and it was local.

The raised funds went towards the £20,000 project of The Complete Renovation and Refurbishment of Children’s Outpatients at Kingston Hospital.

The project will be finished by the end of January and will benefit 10,000 children that pass through the busy department each year.

The boys want to continue collabo-rating and have been invited to the opening of the new Pediatric Ward in January. They will organise another fundraiser during Easter 2013.Students finish their journey at the Eiffel Tower TOM LEANEY

By Alexia Ganotaki

Fire in Kingston

Fire in the offices over Partica dress-up shop ALEX BOYD

Hurricane Sandy left devastation passing through New York in the last days of October REX FEATURES

By Alex Sunier

Amir on the streets of New York AMIR TAGHAN FACEBOOK