Trace Adkins was unfazed as winds and torrential rain lashed New York on Monday, because he regularly faced down storms when he worked on oil rigs.

The singer was in a Big Apple hotel room as post-tropical cyclone Sandy hit the city, and he uploaded a photo of a nearby broken crane to Twitter to show his followers the damage caused by the storm.

However Adkins, who grew up in Louisiana, admits the bad weather didn't worry him.

He tells CMT.com, "When we'd prepare for a storm, when I worked oil rigs offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, you always laid the crane boom down. What they did here on this crane was they left it standing up on an angle, so when the wind caught it, it blew it right back over the top and it flopped over the other way."

"Growing up in Louisiana made me used to this kind of weather, I guess. But they're not used to that up here."

Adkins - who is in New York filming hit U.S. TV show Celebrity Apprentice, which shut down production to prepare for the storm - reveals he witnessed panic in Manhattan stores as worried residents stocked up on supplies.

He adds, "Everyone was fighting each other at Whole Foods... trying to get food. It was nuts. We were just trying to get some water and candy bars."