New York City moved closer to resuming its frenetic pace by getting back its vital subway system three days after superstorm Sandy, but neighbouring New Jersey's coastline remains devastated, with thousands of people in one city still stranded by floodwaters.
The storm-crippled subway trains began rolling uptown from Penn Station shortly after 6 a.m. ET Thursday, although reportedly with lighter than usual ridership.
The subway system is "the lifeline of the city," said technology worker Ronnie Abraham, who was taking the subway on his way home to Harlem. "It can't get much better than this."
After reopening its airports, theatres and stock exchange, city officials hoped the subways would ease the gridlock that had paralyzed the city, forcing cars and pedestrians to inch through crowded streets without working stoplights. But television footage Thursday showed heavy traffic crawling into Manhattan, as police turned away cars that carried fewer than three people — a rule meant to ease the congestion that paralyzed the city earlier this week.
The decision to reopen undamaged parts of the nation's largest transit system came as the region struggled to restore other basic services to recover from a storm that killed at least 69 people, left more than five million without power and caused a total of between $30 billion and $50 billion US in economic damage, as well as $10 billion to $20 billion in insured losses, according to the risk-assessment firm EQECAT.
Two of the region's main airports opened Wednesday and the third, LaGuardia Airport, returned to service Thursday morning. Actors and eager audiences brought darkened Broadway theatres back to life. And New Yorkers packed on to buses that returned for the first time to city streets since the storm, joining a throng of gridlocked traffic that navigated the city without working stop lights.
The New York City Marathon was also set to proceed on Sunday, stirring debate about whether a race that attracted 47,500 runners last year will disrupt recovery efforts.
Across the region, people pulled together, in some cases providing comfort to those left homeless, in others offering hot showers and electrical outlets for charging cellphones to those without power.
The spirit of can-do partnership extended even to politicians, who at least made the appearance of putting their differences aside to focus together on Sandy.
"We are here for you," U.S. President Barack Obama said in Brigantine, N.J., touring a ravaged shore. "We are not going to tolerate red tape. We are not going to tolerate bureaucracy."
Obama joined Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who had been one of the most vocal supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, to tour the ravaged coast. But the two men spoke only of helping those harmed by the storm.
Lack of power, water, transportation
Passengers exit a downtown-bound subway train in New York's Times Square on Thursday. (Richard Drew/Associated Press) On Wednesday, masses of people walked shoulder-to-shoulder across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan for work, reaching an island where many took the lack of power and water and transportation as a personal challenge.
At a fire hydrant on West 16th Street, nine-year-old Shiyin Ge and her brother, 12-year-old Shiyuan Ge, stood in line to fill up buckets of water. But unlike the adults, the two kids held plastic Halloween candy pails painted with grinning jack-o-lanterns.
"There's no water in our house," said Shiyin Ge, who had planned to dress up as a ladybug for Halloween.
More than a dozen of the city's subway lines were expected to offer some service on Thursday, but none below Manhattan's 34th Street, a line of demarcation in the city separating the hardest-hit residents from those who escaped the brunt.
In parts of upper Manhattan, "it's hard to tell there's anything wrong," CBC's Tom Parry reported.
"The lights are on. Everything seems OK. But all across huge swaths of lower Manhattan, the power is still out, and at night the area is just pitch black," he said.
Downtown Manhattan, which includes the city's financial district, Sept. 11 memorial and other tourist sites, was still mostly an urban landscape of shuttered bodegas and boarded-up restaurants, where people roamed in search of food, power and a hot shower.
To get there from Brooklyn or Queens, commuters who would normally zoom beneath the East River in tunnels that flooded will have to take shuttle buses, adding to the enormous stress already being placed on gridlocked Manhattan streets.
"We are going to need some patience and tolerance," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday.
The airports and subways weren't the only transportation systems returning to the region. Suburban trains started running for the first time on Wednesday, and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor was to take commuters from city to city for on Friday for the first time since the storm.
Still, one of the biggest problems for the New York area is to restore its hobbled electricity grid.
"There are hundreds of thousands of customers who still don't have power," the CBC's Melissa Kent reported Thursday.
"There was a small glimmer of hope last night when about 2,000 of the 250,000 customers without power in lower Manhattan got their electricity restored," she added. "There are still many, many challenges ahead."
'The task is just enormous'
From West Virginia to the Jersey Shore, the storm's damage was still being felt, and seen.
In New Jersey, signs of the good life that had defined wealthy shorefront enclaves like Bayhead and Mantoloking lay scattered and broken: $3,000 barbecue grills buried beneath the sand and hot tubs cracked and filled with seawater. Nearly all the homes were seriously damaged, and many had entirely disappeared.
"This," said Harry Typaldos, who owns the Grenville Inn in Mantoloking, "I just can't comprehend."
More than two million people are reportedly still without power in the state. Most of the mass transit systems remained shut down, leaving hundreds of thousands of commuters braving clogged highways and long lines at gas stations. Atlantic City's casinos remained closed. Christie postponed Halloween until Monday, saying trick-or-treating wasn't safe in towns with flooded and darkened streets, fallen trees and downed power lines.
"The National Guard has been brought in in to help," Parry said. "But the task is just enormous."
Farther north in Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, nearly 20,000 residents remained stranded in their homes, amid accusations that officials have been slow to deliver food and water. One man blew up an air mattress and floated to City Hall, demanding to know why supplies hadn't gotten out. At least one-fourth of the city's residents are flooded and 90 per cent are without power.
On New York's Long Island, bulldozers scooped sand off streets and tow trucks hauled away destroyed cars, while residents tried to find a way to their homes to restart their lives. Joanne and Richard Kalb used a rowboat to reach their home in Mastic Beach, filled with a metre of water.
Her husband, exasperated by the futility of their effort, posted a sign on a telephone pole, asking drivers to slow down: "Slow please no wake."
A man looks over the debris on the Seaside Heights, N.J., beach near Casino Pier on Wednesday. (David Gard/Star-Ledger/Associated Press) Snow drifts as high as 1.5 metres piled up in West Virginia, where the former Hurricane Sandy merged with two winter weather systems as it went inland. Heavy snow collapsed parts of an apartment complex, a grocery store, a hardwood plant and three homes. The sixth person killed in the state was a candidate for the state House of Delegates, John Rose Sr., who was struck by a falling tree limb. His name will remain on the ballot on Election Day.
Several centimetres of snow might fall in West Virginia, but meteorologists said Sandy's days are numbered. The National Weather Service said Wednesday that the last remnants of the storm are in the Appalachian Mountains, and will be gone by the end of the week.
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