Storm Aftermath: Continuing Coverage

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As complaints about post-storm price-gouging continue to pile up, New Jersey Attorney General Jeffrey S. Chiesa filed complaints against seven gas stations and a hotel on Friday, accusing them of “exploiting people’s misery to make a quick profit.”

One of the gas stations, a Lukoil in Paterson, increased its price by more than $2 a gallon, to $5.49 from $3.45, after the storm, Mr. Chiesa said. The hotel, a Howard Johnson Express Inn in Parsippany, increased its room rate to $119 from $90, Mr. Chiesa said.

The merchants face penalties of $10,000 for a first offense if found guilty. Price gouging is defined as increasing prices by more than 10 percent during an emergency, beyond covering any additional costs brought on by the emergency itself.

The attorney general’s office has received 2,000 complaints from people in five counties in the wake of the storm, Mr. Chiesa said. Four percent of the state’s gas stations have been the subject of complaints.

In New York, the office of Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman said that it had received 600 complaints so far including one that a grocery in Battery Park City charged $10 for a box of matches and another that a Waldbaum’s in Carle Place on Long Island charged $6.99 for a small bag of potatoes that was $2.99 before the storm.

The attorney general has also subpoenaed Craigslist for information about people who have been offering non-bargains like an empty five-gallon gas container for $500 or a $700 generator for $1,200.

Last year after Tropical Storm Irene, the office received only about a dozen complaints. Two of them led to fines of several thousand dollars against gas stations, including one in Yonkers that charged 97 cents more per gallon after the storm, and another in Farmingdale on Long Island that increased its price by 84 cents a gallon.

In Brooklyn, District Attorney Charles J. Hynes announced Thursday that he would impanel a grand jury to investigate price-gouging.

— ANDY NEWMAN

Looking to streamline the daunting process for homeowners of getting storm-damaged homes fixed up, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled a program Friday in which homeowners can simply register and contractors will perform and oversee the repairs, with homeowners not having to reach into their pockets.

With contractors, electricians, plumbers and other tradesmen suddenly inundated with work, many homeowners have been finding it next to impossible to get workers to their houses. And though their insurers and the Federal Emergency Management Agency may eventually reimburse them, paying for the work up front is another hurdle.

Under the new program called NYC Rapid Repairs, said the mayor, “Once you’ve signed up, a contractor will come to your home, asses the damage, create a work order and within a short time the work will be done.”

There will be caps on how much work will be covered, however. Currently, FEMA offers $10,000 in housing-repair reimbursement. The city hopes to set the cap considerably higher for this program, an official said.

Teams of contractors will be assigned to each affected neighborhood and “will be able to work on multiple buildings at once, not just one at a time,” the mayor said.

He said that homes that need the least work will be dealt with first.

Homeowners can register for the program starting on Tuesday at DisasterAssistance.gov or by calling 1-800-621-3362.

— ANDY NEWMAN

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The A train’s causeway over Jamaica Bay to the Rockaways, swamped and ripped up by Hurricane Sandy, remains out of service, a work in progress.

But residents of the Rockaways received two pieces of good transportation news on Friday. One is that A train service within the Rockaway peninsula will resume on Sunday, with a shuttle bus connection across Jamaica Bay to subway service at Howard Beach, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said.

The other is that ferry service to Manhattan will begin on Monday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said.

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Seastreak, a company that runs ferries to Atlantic Highlands, N.J., among other places, will operate the ferries, which will run from Beach 108th Street and Beach Channel Drive and stop at Pier 11 near South Street Seaport, with free transfers between Pier 11 and East 34th Street in Midtown.

There will be five morning boats to Manhattan, from 5:45 a.m. to 9:20 a.m., and three in the evening. The fare will be $2 each way. The trip to Pier 11 will take 50 minutes.

— ANDY NEWMAN

The Statue of Liberty’s torch has been snuffed for a while. But the statue itself will be visible in the dark again beginning tonight, the National Park Service said.

Using three small diesel generators fueled from a tank on Liberty Island, a lighting company has devised a makeshift system for illuminating the statue until power is restored on the island, said David Barna, a spokesman for the park service in Washington.

The monument, including its iconic torch, and the museum on nearby Ellis Island have been without power since Hurricane Sandy hit on Oct. 29. The islands suffered significant damage and will be closed to visitors indefinitely, the park service said.

The lighting system was donated to the National Park Foundation, which raises private funds for national parks, by Musco Lighting. Mr. Barna said the value of Musco’s donation would be about $140,000.

— PATRICK MCGEEHAN

President Obama is coming to New York City on Thursday to see the damage from Hurricane Sandy firsthand, a White House official said this afternoon.

The president will “view storm damage, talk with citizens who are recovering from the storm and thank first responders who put their lives at risk to protect their communities,” the official said.

— ANDY NEWMAN

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In dealing with New York’s worst gasoline crisis since the 1970s, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg waded Thursday into a problem that has stumped people for years: Is the number zero odd, even or neither?

“Those with license plates ending in an even number, or the number zero, will be able to buy gas or diesel only on even-numbered days, such as Saturday, Nov. 10,” the mayor said as he announced the imposition of odd-even gas rationing. Those with license plates ending in odd numbers or a letter can buy gas on only odd-numbered dates.

To mathematicians, it was a little astonishing that zero had to be singled out at all. (Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said nothing regarding zero in his gas-rationing announcement last week.)

“It’s absolutely not a matter of debate,” said Walter Neumann, the chairman of Barnard College’s mathematics department.

He explained that even integers, or whole numbers, are defined as numbers that can be divided by two without producing nonwhole numbers. Dividing three by two produces 1.5, making it odd; dividing four by two produces two, making it even. Zero divided by two equals zero — no fraction or nonwhole number results. So zero is even.

“It’s very clear,” said Marc Masdeu, an assistant professor at Columbia University who specializes in number theory, sounding puzzled at the question.

But tell that to the Parisian police officers who, during a smog alarm in 1977, were assigned to enforce a system under which cars with odd license plates could be driven on odd days, and even plates on even. Those with license plates ending in zero drove with impunity, because the police did not know what to do about zero, according to a paper by Prof. Hossein Arsham of the University of Baltimore, who has written about the concept of zero.

If anything, the mayor’s decision to single out zero underscores just how tricky a place it occupies in the pantheon of numbers. Until Europeans adopted Arabic numerals in the Middle Ages, the concept of nothing, or none, had no numerical representation in the Western world. And any elementary school student can reel off a litany of arithmetic rules that mark off zero as special and strange.

“Treating zero as a number is already interesting,” said Jonathan Goodman, a professor of mathematics at New York University. “If people don’t think that zero’s a number, the question of whether zero’s even or odd doesn’t occur.”

Befuddlement over which way zero swings persists on the Internet. Last month, phrases like “is zero odd or even” were searched via Google more than 6,000 times globally.

And that is why Mr. Bloomberg singled out the number for mention, Marc LaVorgna, a spokesman for the mayor, said. “Zero can be a point of confusion, so we wanted to be absolutely clear in the rule.”

— VIVIAN YEE

Meanwhile, just across the New York City line in Westchester County, where there is no odd-even rule in effect, were the gas stations inundated with Bronx refugees driving cars with even-numbered plates, desperate to fill their tanks today?

They were not, at least if a phone survey of 10 stations in Yonkers, Mount Vernon, Pelham Manor and New Rochelle was any indication.

Five of the stations were out of gas. But the other five were selling gas and reported no significant waits.

“Last week we had lines that were miles long here,” said Chris Kraft, co-owner of the 76 station at 920 McLean Avenue in Yonkers, barely two blocks from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx. Today, he said at noon, “maybe eight cars.”

There did seem to be a fair number of out-of-towners, though, Mr. Kraft said. “I see a lot of people that I’ve never seen before, and they look like they’re from New York,” he said. He was asked to elaborate. “People that look like they’re from the Bronx.”

At U.S. Petroleum on Main Street in New Rochelle, two miles up Boston Post Road from the Bronx border, the man on the phone reported all was well.

“No lines,” the man said. “You can get all day, no problem.”

— ANDY NEWMAN

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The big question on Day 1 of gas rationing, at least in drivers’ minds, is whether it is leading to shorter lines. There was no overview immediately available from the mayor or the Police Department in New York City, but there was anecdotal evidence on Twitter of short lines, in Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn and on Queens Boulevard in Queens …

RT @waterwinetravel: @brooklyngasCoastal station at Fulton/Vanderbilt has regular gas only.No line. Cops enforcing rationing. Odd #s onl
— NYC GAS (@NYC_GAS) November 9, 2012

@nyc_gas #nycgas gas station on utica and Atlantic Ave had gas his morning around 730 short line. 6 cars.
— iDatBkDude (@DatBkDude) November 9, 2012

… and in Babylon in Suffolk County.

Now that looks like a gas line 3 cars !#LiGas #LiHasGas #LongIsland Rt 109 & Wellwood ave twitter.com/Stockadamus/st…
— STOCKADAMUS✅ (@Stockadamus) November 9, 2012

With at least half the cars on the road suddenly ineligible to buy gas, the lines certainly should have been shorter. Though there were plenty of exceptions, the vast majority of drivers with even-numbered plates knew to stay away from the pumps.

At a busy Hess station at 10th Avenue and West 45th Street, a police officer stood in the street, checking license plates and waving away cars with even plates. The officer, who would not give his name, said that only about one in 50 cars had an even number.

But there were still plenty of long lines. The queue at a Hess station on Fourth Avenue in Gowanus, Brooklyn, wound far around the corner onto Sackett Street and nearly out of sight. More dispatches from the waiting line came in from Ditmas Park, Brooklyn….

Waited 75 mins for gas at Foster & CIA in Ditmas Park. #nycgas
— David Cook (@davidcookmusic) November 9, 2012

… and from East New York, where a driver who waited 45 minutes – not that bad, in the scheme of things – emerged with sense of humor intact:

#brooklyngas RT @daneshad: Just filled up gas in Brooklyn @ Fulton & Pennsylvania Ave. The wait was about 45 mins and when I left a new tan
— NYC GAS (@NYC_GAS) November 9, 2012

— ANDY NEWMAN

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, resuming his weekly radio show for the first time since Hurricane Sandy pounded the region, urged New York City drivers to be patient as they get accustomed to a mandatory gas-rationing system that began Friday morning.

He also cautioned that the waits at gas stations, where often apoplectic drivers have routinely waited for hours to fill their tanks since the storm hit, would not necessarily be drastically shorter as a result of the new rules, which restrict refilling to cars with even-number license plates on even-number days and odd-number plates on odd-number days. And that is because the chief problem remained the extensive damage sustained by distribution terminals.

“There’s no guarantee that odd-even is going to make a big difference,” the mayor said, calling in for a shorter-than-usual interview with John Gambling on WOR-AM. “The real answer — all the experts believe — is just with time. They really thought that the damage to some of these small distribution terminals was not anywhere near as extensive as it was when they finally got electricity back and then tried to get it going.”

Mr. Bloomberg also said, in response to a question about how it would seem logical for gas station owners, as businessmen, to try to be open for business: “I assume that that’s the case, so there’s got to be some reason why.”

He added: “And I think part of it really is they just don’t think that these terminals can fill the trucks anyway near fast enough, and so they wouldn’t get gas, they’d only be open for a couple of hours, and maybe pay have to pay their employees full-day. I don’t know.”

New York City’s rationing effort coincided with one that began Friday morning in Nassau and Suffolk Counties and followed odd-even rules imposed for 12 New Jersey counties last Saturday. The gas shortage was also exacerbated by the northeaster on Wednesday, which interrupted work to repair petroleum terminals and slowed barges carrying fuel from reaching their docks.

To make the rationing system go as smoothly as possible, Mr. Bloomberg said Friday that the city had “put a police officer at every gas station.”

But he also suggested that city residents appreciated the efforts that companies and city agencies had put in during the last two weeks to helping the region recover more quickly. He said that his own respect for companies and city agencies had “doubled or tripled.”

He also said that his primary focus was not on gas, but rather on helping tens of thousands of people — about half of whom live in public housing — “get power back” so they can “get back to much more normal life.”

Mr. Bloomberg said that he hoped that all public housing developments would have electricity by Friday night, and heat by early next week.

“Then we can worry about lost belongings, things like that,” he said.

— DAVID W. CHEN

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At the Hess station at McGuinness Boulevard and Greenpoint Avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the wait for gas this morning was only about 20 minutes — far shorter than it had been in recent days, said Tony Dazzo, 35, an engineer who lives in Queens and was filling his car.

“They should have done it sooner,” he said. “It gets half the people off the line and moves it a lot more quickly.”

Most of those in line had odd-numbered plates or plates that ended in letters, in keeping with the new rule. But not all of them. Around 8 a.m., Cynthia Quiles, 42, a janitor for the Department of Education, filled up her Chevy Tahoe with an even-numbered plate even as 10 police officers stood by.

She said her job gave her an exception to the rule, even though those officially exempt from it include only cabs and liveries, buses and paratransit vehicles, emergency vehicles, commercial vehicles and those with M.D. plates.

“I think it’s a fair rule,” she said. “Because the lines are ridiculous.”

Ms. Quiles added that twice in the past two weeks she had gotten in line for gas at 10 p.m. with a half tank and slept in her idling car until she could get gas at 7 a.m.

A block away, at a Gulf station at 176 McGuinness, Angel Perez, 34, who packages artwork, was turned away. He would have been welcome despite his even-numbered license plate if only he had a corporate account, but he did not. The station accepted all drivers with accounts, regardless of their plate numbers, as well as other drivers with odd-numbered plates. There were no police officers there, even though there were 10 nearby at the Hess station.

Mr. Perez, who drove to Brooklyn from Staten Island, said it was the third time he was turned away by 8 a.m.

“I didn’t know about it until this morning, and look at me, I’m on empty,” he said, pointing at his dashboard. “I understand he’s trying to keep things organized, I just wish I had a little more notice.”

— NATE SCHWEBER

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Jasmin Espinao, 34, who works at a construction company, went out of her way to get gasoline on Friday morning because she has an odd-numbered license plate and heard on the radio that only cars with odd plates could fill up on Friday (Nov. 9) under a rule announced Thursday by the mayor. She hoped the line might be shorter. But she was too early.

At 5:45 a.m., 15 minutes before the rule would take effect, Ms. Espinao got in line at the BP station on the corner of Flushing and Bushwick Avenues in Brooklyn behind a slew of cars with even-numbered plates. Many of them were presumably trying to beat the deadline, as drivers were apparently doing across the city.

#bp on #woodhavenblvd longggg line w/ even number plates filling up before the gas rationing rule kicks in at 6am #pix11news
— Dan Mannarino (@Pix11Dan) November 9, 2012

“I think it’s a good idea, but the fact that you’re in line with evens, it’s like, what?” Ms. Espinao said. “It makes no sense. I hope it works, but it should be clear.”

Benson Flemming, 39, an information technologist who lives in Queens, waited in line for 45 minutes sometime around 4 a.m. at a gas station in Brooklyn, only to have the station run dry just as he got to the pumps. He had gone there, the BP at Flushing and Bushwick, in desperation and frustration. He said he hoped the mayor’s odd-even rationing could cut the lines.

“If there’s something he can do to improve the situation, he needs to do it,” Mr. Flemming said.

As the clock struck 6, Jose Dominguez, 36, a truck driver, waited in line to fill up his personal vehicle, a Honda sedan with an even-numbered plate. He said more patience was needed.

“We just have to cope with it,” he said. “We just have to cooperate.”

As of 6:25, there were 10 cars at the station’s pumps, two of them with even-numbered plates. Drivers who violated the rule (doing so is a misdemeanor punishable by up to three months in jail) were not being told to go away by station attendants, and there were no police officers visible.

Nor did enforcement of the rule seem to be immediate at a station in Old Westbury on Long Island, where a radio reporter from WINS said, “I haven’t seen the police turn any even-numbered plates away.”

At the BP on Flushing and Bushwick, Raj Singh, 23, a station attendant, said he didn’t know about the mayor’s order.

“I have no idea about that,” he said.

When asked if the police were helping to enforce the rule, he replied, “there are no police.”

At 6:35, with the line stretching four blocks down Flushing Avenue, the station ran out of gas.

One by one, frustrated drivers peeled off to continue their search.

— NATE SCHWEBER

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10:23 p.m. | Updated A revised version of this article is available here.

With gas lines in New York City still stubbornly long and no relief for gas shortages in sight, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg imposed an odd-even gas rationing rule Thursday that goes into effect at 6 a.m. tomorrow. Identical rules are going into effect in Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island at 5 a.m. tomorrow.

The mayor said the measure, imposed by emergency order and similar to one put in place in 12 New Jersey counties by Gov. Chris Christie on Saturday that has been considered effective, should cut down lines and allow gas stations to stay open later.

“This is not a step that we take lightly,” he said, “but given the shortage that we will face for the next few weeks and the growing frustrations of New Yorkers, we believe it is the right step.”

The gas rule applies to most private cars. Buses, taxis and livery cabs, emergency vehicles, commercial vehicles, paratransit vehicles and cars with MD plates are all exempt.

Under the rule, motorists whose license plates end in an odd number or any letter or other character will be able to buy gas only on odd-numbered dates of the month.

Drivers with even-numbered plates (0 counts as an even number) will be able to buy gas only on even-numbered dates.

Violations of the gas rule are class B misdemeanors, punishable by up to three months in jail.

Only about 25 percent of the city’s 800 gas stations are open at a given time during the day, the mayor’s press office said (the vast majority of city stations reported by users of the crowd-sourced site GasBuddy are also out of gas). But AAA and the federal Energy Information Administration provided higher, and different, figures, saying that their surveys of stations show that about 70 percent of stations in the city sold gas at some point today. The reasons for the size of the discrepancy were not clear.

Lines of several hours to buy gas, fed in part by panic buying and hoarding, have become the norm in New York City. Fights have broken out on many lines, and the Police Department, already stretched thin dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, has been deployed to maintain order at gas stations all over the city.

In New Jersey, by comparison, Governor Christie said Thursday morning, “I’ve driven around the state the last two days and I’ve barely seen any fuel lines any more. There’s order, there’s plenty of gas.”

New Jersey has an advantage over New York in that it is higher in the supply chain, with many refineries operating in New Jersey. In New York City, many gas stations rely on distribution terminals in Brooklyn and Queens that were damaged by the storm, or lost power, and have not come back fully.

Mayor Bloomberg was asked how long the restriction would remain in place. He said he did not know.

“We’ll keep it in for a while,” he said. “You know, if you think about it, it’s no great imposition once you get used to it.

“We have to do something,” the mayor added, “and this is something that is practical and enforceable and understandable, and doing something is much better than doing nothing.”

— Andy Newman

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this post misstated the odd-even rationing system planned for New York. Qualification for gas will be based on the final character on license plates, not simply the final number.

Nassau and Suffolk Counties on Long Island are imposing an odd-even gas rationing system tomorrow morning at 5 a.m., similar to the system going into effect in New York City, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Thursday.

Governor Cuomo said that Wednesday night’s storm and the power failures it cause had led to longer lines in Long Island, especially in Nassau County, today.

“A partial failure of a terminal served by the Buckeye Pipeline, which pumps approximately 4.5 million gallons of gas per day into the New York City and Long Island area, occurred due to power failures late last night,” Mr. Cuomo said in a statement. ” While power was restored this morning, there was an interruption in the fuel supply chain to those regions.”

Under the rules announced by the governor, drivers of cars with plates that end in even numbers can buy gas only even-numbered dates, and drivers of cars with plates that end in odd numbers can buy gas only on odd-numbered dates.

License plates that end in letters or other characters will be considered odd-numbered plates. Out of state plates will be subject to the same rules.

The restriction does not apply to filling of fuel cans, commercial vehicles, taxi or limousine fleets, or emergency fleets, nor does it apply to hand held gas cans.

An odd-even rationing rule in New Jersey, imposed in 12 counties by Gov. Chris Christie on Saturday, is credited with helping reduce gas lines there.

— ANDY NEWMAN

A New Jersey judge has ruled that displaced voters who could not get through when they requested ballots by fax or e-mail Tuesday can still vote.

The American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey announced on Thursday that Superior Court Judge Walter Koprowski of Essex County had signed the order extending voting for some people.

The state had said voters displaced by Hurricane Sandy could take until Friday to cast ballots by e-mail or fax, as long as they had applied for the special ballots by 5 p.m. on Election Day. The new order [PDF] applies to people who can prove they tried to apply for electronic ballots on time but could not get them because fax lines were busy or e-mail in-boxes were overflowing.

It was not clear how many voters the order applied to.

— THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

The cost to New York’s state government of storm recovery could top $1 billion, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said on Thursday.

“I’ve worked for two years to close deficits, $10 billion deficits, which was all the money in the world,” the governor said at an afternoon news conference. “Now we’re looking at an additional $1 billion on the state side, maybe higher after what’s happened.”

Mr. Cuomo cited an estimate released last week that the entire cost to the region of Hurricane Sandy, in damage and economic loss, could hit $50 billion, $33 billion of it in New York. “That is a staggering number,” he said.

The governor also reiterated his insistence that the nation’s taxpayers, not the state’s, foot the entire bill for damage to the power-delivery system. He was asked whether he would consent to the Long Island Power Authority raising rates if the Federal Emergency Management Agency paid only 75 percent of the utility’s damage costs.

“If FEMA only thinks they’re going to pay 75 percent of damages, I’m going to oppose that,” he said. “If they think any local government or any taxpayer in this state can pay any more for this storm, they are wrong. One hundred percent reimbursement is what we deserve and what we’re going to fight for.”

— ANDY NEWMAN

Federal officials said on Thursday that they had started moving temporary housing toward the New York region, where tens of thousands of people are in need of housing in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is moving mobile homes or manufactured housing toward areas, including Staten Island, that were the most severely damaged by the storm, W. Craig Fugate, the administrator of FEMA, told reporters in a teleconference. He did not know yet exactly where the housing would be located or when people could move in.

In New York City, the estimates of people in need of housing range from 20,000 to 40,000.

Mr. Fugate said some people affected by the storm were staying as far away as Albany.

— MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

The Queens-Midtown Tunnel, which had been flooded by Hurricane Sandy, will reopen to passenger vehicles on Friday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced on Thursday.

The tunnel will reopen at 6 a.m. with two inbound and two outbound lanes. No trucks will be permitted to use the tunnel.

The closing of the tunnel had made for difficult travels for drivers from Queens and Long Island and had caused worse-than-usual congestion on the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge.

“Bringing back the Queens-Midtown Tunnel seemed like an impossible job after the storm, but M.T.A. Bridges and Tunnels workers have done the impossible,” said Joseph J. Lhota, the chairman and chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the tunnel.

The tunnel’s reopening leaves the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel as the last major New York City crossing still closed. There is no time frame for reopening it.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

Yesterday’s northeaster set the recovery effort back only about 24 or 36 hours in New Jersey, Gov. Chris Christie said Thursday morning, striking a relatively hopeful tone.

“’Believe it or not, the snow was helpful,” Mr. Christie said. “Because it wasn’t rain, it helped on the flooding side.” Virtually no significant flooding was reported in the state.

The governor, speaking at a National Guard armory in Somerset, said that while 167,000 of the 390,000 homes without power lost their lights in the northeaster, utility companies were working quickly.

Outside of the most ruined areas, like the barrier islands, where both the infrastructure and many of the individual homes that survived are in tatters, Mr. Christie said he expected that virtually everyone in the state would have power by Saturday.

Other highlights from his news conference:

*Evacuations: He expects to allow residents of coastal communities from Brick Township to Berkeley Township back into their towns for “controlled visits” by this weekend.

*Gasoline: “I’ve driven around the state the last two days and I’ve barely seen any fuel lines any more,” Mr. Christie said. He said he hoped to re-evaluate the odd-even rationing rule over the weekend with an eye toward shelving it.

*Mass transit: New Jersey Transit, whose operations across the state remain badly hobbled, did not sustain any new damage in yesterday’s storm. The state has also added another commuting option: free bus-plus-ferry service from the Meadowlands park-and-ride to Weehawken to West 39th Street in Midtown. “Come to the Meadowlands and get on a bus,” the governor said invitingly.

*Drinking water: The state suffered “a bit of a backslide” yesterday, and there are now boil-water advisories in 11 communities scattered across Sussex, Monmouth and Ocean Counties.

*Schools: 77 percent of the state’s schools are open, the same as yesterday but up from a figure in the 40s on Monday.

Unlike his counterparts across the river in New York, Mr. Christie declined to criticize the state’s utility companies for the pace of power restoration and in fact praised them and their work crews.

While the utilities might have been able to move more quickly, he said, “I would really caution, for political advantage, elected officials from trying to make villains out of people working 18-hour days trying to help the people of New Jersey.” The villain “in this instance,” he said, “is Hurricane Sandy.”

— ANDY NEWMAN

Wednesday’s northeaster might not have brought the flooding that was predicted, but thanks to up to a foot of heavy, wet snow and stiff winds, it still knocked out power to at least 375,000 homes in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, utility companies said, dealing a setback to the region’s slow recovery from Hurricane Sandy.

But utility companies said that their crews — supplemented by thousands of reinforcements from across the country — were working quickly and had already restored power to many or most of their customers that lost it yesterday. With good weather forecast for the next few days, the recovery is expected to move forward. Over all in the tristate area, about 683,000 homes remain in the dark, down from a peak of 5.3 million last week, according to federal figures.

National Weather Service offices covering the three states said that they received virtually no reports of coastal flooding. “Other than in Sandy Hook, where there was minor coastal flooding, we didn’t get any reports,” said Mitchell Gaines, a meteorologist in the Mount Holly, N.J., office. “But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it didn’t happen.”

In New Jersey, parts of which got hit with a foot of snow, at least 230,000 homes lost power. But crews were working quickly to restore it. Public Service Electric & Gas said that it had already restored power to 50,000 of the 90,000 customers who went dark yesterday.

In New York, the Long Island Power Authority reported that 60,000 customers lost power. Consolidated Edison, which serves New York City and Westchester County, reported that 55,000 homes lost power, about half of which have already been restored.

Orange and Rockland Utilities, which serves a swath of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, said that 10,000 of its customers lost power but that more than 9,000 had been restored. And Atlantic City Electric, which had finally brought back on line all its customers who lost power in Hurricane Sandy, lost 21,000 more last night but has restored 14,000 of them.

The highest snowfall totals from the storm were seen in Connecticut, with 13.5 inches in Clintonville and 12 inches in nearby North Haven. United Illuminating, which serves those towns and much of the state’s coastline, said that about 14,000 of its customers lost power, but that all but a few hundred had been restored as of this morning.

Other snowfall totals around the region:

*Manchester Township, Ocean County, N.J: 12 inches.

*Danbury, Conn.: 10 inches.

*Cheesequake, N.J.: 8 inches.

*North Valley Stream on Long Island: 7 inches.

*Flushing, Queens: 7 inches.

*Scarsdale, N.Y.: 7 inches.

*Newark and Jersey City: 6 inches.

*Central Park: 4.7 inches.

— ANDY NEWMAN

A powerful northeaster pushing through the New York area has blanketed the region with a thick layer of snow that is more than seven inches deep in some places.

As of Wednesday evening, parts of Westchester County had received five to seven inches of snow, the National Weather Service said in a statement. The service said that close to three inches had fallen in Central Park in New York City.

Strong winds have also lashed the region, knocking down power lines and cutting electricity to areas where it had only recently been restored in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The weather service clocked gusts of 40 to 50 miles an hour in coastal regions of New York City and Long Island.

The Long Island Rail Road resumed limited departures out of Penn Station in Manhattan and Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn around 7:50 Wednesday night after suspending service completely earlier in the evening because of the wintry storm moving through the area, Sam Zambuto, a railroad spokesman, said. Despite heavy snow and strong winds, trains will proceed slowly along their appointed routes, though the weather could continue to cause delays, Mr. Zambuto said.

— MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

The Long Island Rail Road suspended all departures out of Penn Station in Manhattan and Atlantic Terminal in Brooklyn around 6:40 Wednesday night after a series of storm-related problems developed on several branches, railroad officials said. A spokesman, Sal Arena, said it was not clear when service would resume, though he said the railroad was hopeful that the trains would begin running again Wednesday evening.

All trains that had already left Penn Station and Atlantic Terminal would eventually reach their destinations, railroad officials said.

A railroad spokeswoman, Marjorie Anders, described a litany of woes. “We had a power pole that came down on Little Neck, had to hold four trains,” she said. “Then we had mechanical problems at Bethpage. A crossing gate failure on the West Hempstead branch. We have a third-rail fire at Far Rockaway — the train is backing up to the nearest station in Inwood.”

Penn Station itself was closed after the shutdown was announced, and masses of commuters stood outside at barricades in the falling snow. Mr. Arena said at 7:10 p.m. that the railroad hoped to reopen Penn Station soon and begin running trains.

— ANDY NEWMAN

Hurricane Sandy continued to take a deadly toll more than a week after striking the region, as the police raised to 41 the number of New Yorkers whose deaths were connected to storm.

The latest came on Election Day.

That is when someone found William McKeon, 78, lying at the bottom of a darkened staircase in a building along Shore Front Parkway in the Rockaways, the police said. Bleeding from the head, he was unresponsive and unconscious. The stairs were wet and covered with sand, the police said.

Mr. McKeon, who was found around 9 a.m., died late Tuesday at Jamaica Hospital from “injuries sustained as a result of the storm,” the police said, citing a determination made by the city medical examiner.

Ellen Borakove, a spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office, said the death had been deemed “Hurricane Sandy-related” after it was found that Mr. McKeon suffered blunt trauma to the head after falling down in a stairwell that was blacked out by a power failure.

“If there’s a power outage because it was caused by the storm, it’s storm-related,” she said, adding that “it’s still going to be ruled an accident either way.”

— J. DAVID GOODMAN

Just when Consolidated Edison’s customers thought it was safe to put away the flashlights, Athena blew into town.

The northeaster called Athena (by the Weather Channel) started tearing down power lines on Wednesday faster than an army of repair crews could put them back up. By about 5 p.m., the storm had knocked out electricity to about 11,000 Con Edison customers in New York City and Westchester County, at least a few of whom had just gotten it back after Hurricane Sandy tore through the region last week.

Between the storms, the number of Con Ed customers who have lost power in the last 10 days passed the one million mark, or nearly one-third of the company’s 3.3 million customers, said John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Con Edison.

By nightfall, the new storm’s winds and blowing snow were threatening to drive the crews off the jobs. “At some point,” Mr. Miksad said, “when the winds get too severe, we’ll be pulling back, either just working on the ground or pulling back entirely and hunkering down until we can get back out there.”

All told, about 75,000 Con Edison customers had no power on Wednesday evening, up from about 64,000 earlier in the day, he said.

He added that the company planned to have Russian translators accompany some workers in neighborhoods like Brighton Beach that were hit hard by Hurricane Sandy’s floodwaters to explain to customers that they must repair their electrical equipment before their power can be restored.

— PATRICK MCGEEHAN

New Yorkers displaced by Hurricane Sandy have another option for free housing: Airbnb, an online clearinghouse for renting out your place — or renting someone else’s — has created a special page for people with homes to volunteer and those who need them.

Airbnb announced the plan with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Wednesday, and on its blog.

So far, Airbnb says it’s gotten nearly 2,500 last-minute bookings for affected areas, with more than 4,000 people taking advantage of the free housing.  The company says it will provide its standard customer service and insurance for hosts.

— DIANTHA PARKER

The afternoon tide has come and gone in New York, with no reports of significant flooding, the National Weather Service said.

While storm surges causing moderate and localized major flooding had been forecast for this afternoon, “It seems to have come in under what we had initially expected, which is a good thing,” said David Stark, a meteorologist with the Weather Service’s Upton, N.Y., office.

Some minor flooding was reported in Nassau County. A Newsday reporter posted a photo on Twitter of a flooded street in Freeport.

Street flooding in #Freeport near Nautical Mile. Weren’t we just doing this? #LongIsland instagr.am/p/RvdOCQx0Pk/
— Patrick Whittle (@pxwhittle) November 7, 2012

And some areas on the North Shore of Long Island, around Kings Point, “might touch moderate” flooding this evening, Mr. Stark said. But over all, he said of the flooding, “It looks like it’s going to be more of a minor situation.” The next high tide, after midnight, should not bring as big a surge, Mr. Stark said.

High winds, rain and snow are still expected, though, and hamper recovery efforts. “This is still a significant system,” said Brian Ciemnecki, another Weather Service meteorologist.

In New Jersey, where coastal evacuations were ordered in several towns, the peak concern for coastal flooding is tonight’s high tide, around 2 a.m., The Weather Channel said.

— ANDY NEWMAN

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The northeaster now battering the New York region has snarled FEMA’s efforts to help residents recover from last week’s storm, leading the agency to shut 10 mobile centers.

“We had to close them,” said Mike Byrne, the Federal Emergency Management Agency official overseeing the relief work. “We would really be putting them at risk if we kept them open. The minute the weather clears, they’ll be back open.”

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was asked at his afternoon news conference Wednesday why the city was not ordering evacuations if the meteorological threat was dire enough to drive out FEMA. “We do not believe it’s necessary to evacuate people,” he said.

The closings of the FEMA centers left some residents fuming. “They didn’t want to get their precious van wet,” a church volunteer in Coney Island told the news site DNAInfo, which reported the closings on Wednesday morning.

Mr. Byrne described them as a minor setback and said the agency’s larger efforts in the region were still under way.

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He met Wednesday with 400 employees from agencies across the federal Department of Homeland Security who had volunteered to help with the recovery from Hurricane Sandy. They are staying aboard a merchant marine ship stationed off Staten Island’s north shore. They had eschewed accommodations on land, he said, to keep hotel rooms available for people whose homes have been damaged or destroyed. Another 400 people were expected to arrive Thursday.

“It’s certainly not the Ritz,” Mr. Byrne said. “It’s certainly enough, and the people and the morale are just great.”

The volunteers include information-technology experts, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees and airport security staff members. They are supplementing the roughly 2,000 FEMA employees in the region for the relief effort, which Mr. Byrne described as “The Four P’s: People, Power, Pumps and Picking up Debris.”

He said FEMA had already provided more than two million meals to hungry people; helped pump out the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel (officially called the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel); and provided rental assistance to families hit by the storm.

— SAM DOLNICK

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg was scheduled to give a briefing at 3 p.m. from City Hall. Watch in the video player above or click here.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

Montclair High School in New Jersey had been closed since Hurricane Sandy struck last Monday.

Today, the school reopened.

But not for long.

This afternoon, parents received a text message: “MHS has lost power & will close early at 2:20, Nov 7.”

— ANDY NEWMAN AND MICHAEL KOLOMATSKY

Frustrated L-train riders: here’s something to keep you entertained as you wait for your beloved, accursed subway line to reopen: seven minutes of video from the M.T.A. of transit hard-hats working down in the tunnel at Bedford Avenue yesterday.

Highlights include a steampunk-looking blue machine [0:48 of the video], a sweet tunnel shot straight out of Hitchcock [1:09], a lingering close-up of rusty electrical panels [3:25] , some good jargon (“I got AC and float on both units, all right, center module… power to the WRPS on all three lights”) [4:35] and a great industrial-noise soundtrack throughout.

Unfortunately, the agency cannot say yet when L service will be restored. Joseph J. Lhota, the M.T.A. chairman, said yesterday that L service had a “lower probability of happening” today than service on the G line, which did in fact resume this morning, and a transit spokesman said this afternoon that not much had changed.

But the video is practically the next best thing to riding the train. Almost.

— ANDY NEWMAN

The city has suspended alternate-side parking rules through Saturday to facilitate storm-recovery efforts. With no alternate-side restrictions on Sundays and the Veterans Day parking holiday coming up Monday, that means at least six more days of not having to make way for the street-sweeper.

— ANDY NEWMAN

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With a storm surge heading toward New Jersey’s battered coast and three to six inches of heavy, wet snow possible inland, Gov. Chris Christie warned Wednesday morning that many residents who have gotten their power back since the storm may lose it again.

“I can see us actually moving backwards,” Mr. Christie said at a news conference at a firehouse in Harvey Cedars on Long Beach Island, the barrier island that suffered some of the heaviest damage in last week’s storm.

Long Beach Island had been reopened to residents, but the governor said he was cutting off access again, “in consultation with elected officials, for the next day or so, because of this nor’easter.”

Mr. Christie said that he had advised officials on the island to reinforce the protective dunes that are credited with limiting damage from Hurricane Sandy.

“While we’re doing what we can to increase the dunes,” he said, “we don’t know how well they’ll hold.”

Mr. Christie said that 369,000 homes in the state were still without power, down from a peak of 2.76 million. While power crews are still at work, Mr. Christie said that if winds reach 40 miles an hour today, as they are predicted to do, the crews will have to stop work, per federal safety law.

Inland, Mr. Christie said, the forecast wet snow would fall on trees that have been weakened by the storm and still have leaves on them that would catch the snow, presenting a threat of downed branches and power lines. As of noon, snow was already falling in northern New Jersey, while sleet pelted the southern half of the state.

@katebilo Here is one I sent to CBSphilly from Clayton NJ Now its turning into rain mixed with the snow.twitpic.com/bb5n1t
— tara laracuente (@taracl87) November 7, 2012

In general, Mr. Christie said, the state is ready for the storm. Shelters are prepared to take in a surge of people, and 20 truckloads of water were on the way to parts of Middlesex County that already have a boil-water advisory in effect. [Update: the advisory was lifted on Wednesday.]

He said that the odd-even gas rationing rule he put into effect on Saturday had been relatively effective and that he would decide over the weekend whether to keep it in place next week.

But nearly a quarter of the state’s school systems are not fully operating, 10 percent of residents still lack power, and the governor said he had had just about enough from Mother Nature.

“When I got the final forecast last night,” he said, “I’m waiting for the locusts and pestilence next.”

— ANDY NEWMAN

All New York City parks, beaches and playgrounds have been closed by the city because of expected bad weather and will remain closed until noon on Thursday, according to the city’s Parks and Recreations Department.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

More than 1,000 flights in and out of airports in the Northeast have been canceled in advance of the storm, according to the Web site NYC Aviation.

The three New York area airports, Philadelphia International Airport and Boston Logan International Airport were among the hardest hit.

Travelers are urged to contact their carriers for further information about their flights.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

As a powerful storm bore down on the New York City region, city officials encouraged drivers to stay off the roads after 5 p.m. because of high winds and possible flooding. The storm was predicted to have sustained winds of 25 to 40 miles per hour with gusts as high as 65 miles per hour.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

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With the northeaster closing in on the city, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg advised residents of some low-lying neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens to “consider taking shelter with family or friends, or at a city-run shelter,” based on “analysis of the erosion caused by Hurricane Sandy.”

The mayor specifically cited Gerritsen Beach in Brooklyn, Hamilton Beach near Howard Beach in Queens, and Breezy Point in the Rockaways. But he added that the police would be making similar announcements over loudspeakers in “other areas that saw significant flooding.”

The storm surge accompanying this afternoon’s high tide is expected to be the highest of the storm. High tide at the Battery in Manhattan is at 1:37 p.m.

A listing of city shelters can be found here.

A listing of pickup locations for buses going to shelters is here.

— ANDY NEWMAN

The G train’s back – thanks Obama! twitter.com/GogoGowanus/st…
— Matt Kaplan (@GogoGowanus) November 7, 2012

The G train is back, mostly. The train, the only line that connects Queens and Brooklyn without traveling through Manhattan, resumed limited service on Wednesday morning, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said.

“G trains resumed service at 8:55 a.m. along their full route from Church Avenue in Brooklyn to Court Square in Queens,” according to an M.T.A. news release. “The restoration is possible after M.T.A. crews worked around the clock to pump water from the Greenpoint tube under Newtown Creek, which flooded during the storm. The tube suffered severe damage to its signaling and communications systems and requires extensive repairs.

You get what you get …RT @paulineym: @patkiernan G train service even *more* limited? That means what, one train per fortnight?
— Pat Kiernan (@patkiernan) November 7, 2012

But because of continued repairs, trains will operate at slower speeds. To accommodate demands, the number of cars on each train will be doubled to 8 from 4. But the M.T.A. warns that delays and overcrowding should be expected.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

Wednesday was the first day back at school for many students and faculty affected by Hurricane Sandy.

Franklin K. Lane in Brooklyn, which already houses four high schools under one roof, is absorbing two schools that are normally in one building on Broad Channel.

That campus, called Beach Channel, was flooded, according to students and teachers. It is unclear when the building will be safe for use.

So on Wednesday at 7:30 a.m., students and faculty from hurricane-torn areas hopped off buses and out of family members’ cars to head into their new school.

“We made it,” said one teacher as she trekked up a small hill toward the campus.

Beach Channel teachers high-fived students and asked about their families. Nearly everyone passing through the school gates seemed relieved to return to a semblance of normality.

“I’m sort of in limbo now,” said Liza Sklar, 45, a librarian from the Beach Channel campus. The storm flooded the basement, den and first floor of her house in Oceanside on Long Island, and she has been living in one room with her husband, two children and a dog. The Federal Emergency Management Agency denied them any assistance, she said.

At the entrance to Franklin K. Lane, the three-member social studies team from the Channel View School for Research, one of the two displaced schools, served as the welcome committee. “Oh my God, there is more of our kids, dude,” said Craig Dorsi, a world history teacher, as he hugged Brianna Stevens, 14.

“We’re trying to make it as emotionally normal as possible,” said Mr. Dorsi.

There are 664 students at his school, and many of them are still spread around the area because they evacuated during the storm. Others are at home in storm-affected areas and are without power or Internet. Some may not even realize that school is back in session. “We’re expecting anywhere from 40 to 664,” said Mr. Dorsi.

With unfamiliar faces coming in, there is always a risk of fights or scuffles. But several students and faculty members from both campuses said they were not overly concerned about conflict among students. The scene outside school on Wednesday was peaceful. “Honestly, I think our kids will be happy to help,” said Adrian Constant, 42, an English teacher at one of the high schools on the Franklin K. Lane campus.

— JULIE TURKEWITZ

Victims of Hurricane Sandy will get a bit of extra help from the federal government to find a temporary place to live.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency is announcing Wednesday morning that it is increasing its assistance to displaced families to 125 percent of the normal federal rental subsidy.

This means that Hurricane Sandy victims will get $1,843 a month in assistance for a two-bedroom apartment in New York City, compared with the standard federal subsidy of $1,474.

Even with the extra money, it is far below what many New Yorkers pay in rent. But FEMA officials estimate that this change, which also applies in New Jersey, will allow people displaced by the storm to afford apartments currently out of reach.

— ERIC LIPTON

The National Weather service issued a coastal flood warning Tuesday afternoon as a northeaster advanced toward the East Coast, predicting moderate flooding Wednesday in most of coastal New York and New Jersey, but possible localized major flooding on the south shore of Long Island.

The area at highest risk for major flooding is from Lindenhurst to Freeport in Nassau County, several towns east of Long Beach and the Rockaways, which were devastated in last week’s storm.

The latest Weather Service forecast calls for a storm surge Wednesday of 2.5 to 5 feet, with New York Harbor likely to have a surge on the lower end of that range, said David Stark, a meteorologist in the Upton, N.Y., office. The storm surge from Hurricane Sandy at the Battery at the bottom of Manhattan by comparison was 9.23 feet. The highest surge Wednesday, closer to 5 feet, will be on the south and north shores of Long Island, Mr. Stark said.

The flood warning is in effect from 11 a.m. Wednesday to 6 a.m. Thursday. That period includes the high tides at 1:37 p.m. Wednesday and 2:40 a.m. Thursday in the Battery.

“Locally major flooding could occur in places due to changes to underwater slopes and/or loss of protective dunes, both caused by Sandy,” the flood warning reads. “Widespread flooding of vulnerable shore roads and/or basements will hamper recovery efforts.”

The strongest winds, too, will be on Long Island, with gusts up to 70 miles an hour possible, Mr. Stark said. Sustained winds across the region will be in the range of 25 to 40 miles an hour — enough to bring down weakened trees and lead to another round of power failures.

“With the wind and the potential coastal flooding,” Mr. Stark said, “it is shaping up to have a significant impact on our area.”

The Weather Service is also predicting moderate coastal flooding in New Jersey, which could lead to closings of flood-prone road like Routes 35 and 36 and other roads that are being used by crews working on storm response. “They many not be able to do much work tomorrow,” said Dean Iovino, a meteorologist in the Weather Service’s Mount Holly, N.J., office.

The storm is expected to bring one to two inches of rain, with the figure in New York City being near the low end. There is little chance of snow in the city, the Weather Service said, but the northern suburbs could see some wet flakes, and Orange County and the lower Hudson Valley could see an inch or more.

— ANDY NEWMAN

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A National Guard truck carrying Guard members involved in the storm relief effort struck and killed an 82-year-old man on Canal Street in Chinatown on Tuesday afternoon, the authorities said.

The man, who was not immediately identified by the police, suffered “severe body trauma” from the impact with the large, green-camouflage-color truck, one of more than 600 vehicles that the New York National Guard has deployed to carry food, water and other relief to storm-struck areas of the state.

He was pronounced dead at New York Downtown Hospital shortly after the accident, which occurred around 1:25 p.m. near the intersection with Centre Street, the police said.

“They were conducting a resupply mission when this unfortunate accident occurred,” said Eric Durr, a spokesman for the National Guard. He said the vehicle belonged to the 369th Sustainment Brigade, based out of the Harlem armory, and was part of a convoy.

The police said the truck, a personnel carrier, was traveling west on Canal Street when it struck the man, who was crossing Canal from north to south. It was not clear whether the man or the truck’s driver was disobeying a traffic signal; no summons was immediately issued and the police said the investigation was continuing. The driver was not publicly identified.

Mr. Durr said the convoy had been involved in carting supplies and was en route to the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center to pick up items donated by Wal-Mart and then take them to a relief staging area at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn for distribution.

“There was a police escort in front,” Mr. Durr said. “The truck that struck the gentleman was the last vehicle in the convoy.”

He added, “Apparently, the gentleman stepped off into traffic.”

— J. DAVID GOODMAN

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In the storm-battered Rockaways, already beset with huge problems from Hurricane Sandy, more of them cropped up before dawn Tuesday at one of the biggest polling sites.

Poll workers arrived in the dark to find that the portable toilets and the main generator to power the site had been stolen, after being delivered hours earlier by federal emergency workers.

The thieves did leave a smaller generator behind, but siphoned out all of its gas, said John Luisi, a Board of Elections official helping to run the site.

“I guess they didn’t realize Rockaway is a war zone right now,” said Estel Lyons, a registered nurse who lives on 123rd Street and was working as a poll worker. Ms. Lyons said she voted and decided to work at the polling site because “you want to feel like your voice is being heard.”

Poll workers scrambled to get gas to run the remaining generator and open the site, in the outdoor playground of Public School 180, which overlooks Jamaica Bay at Beach 104th Street in Queens and has views of the Manhattan skyline. Voters arrived and flooded into the dimly lighted, low-slung tents set up for them to cast ballots.

Most of the voters were local residents whose homes had suffered damage from the storm and who have been living without power for more than a week. Others had evacuated the Rockaways and had returned to vote.

“I wasn’t going to let no hurricane stop me from voting,” said Amos Eberhardt, 61, who left his room in a halfway house on Beach 116th Street and moved into a halfway house in Brooklyn, from which it took him 90 minutes to travel by bus back to the Rockaways to cast his vote.

Nicole McCormick, 35, a medical administrator, had ridden out the hurricane in her upper-floor apartment and then moved to a friend’s home in Jamaica, Queens. But Ms. McCormick – with two children, Tyler Frazier, 14, and Cheniya Sanford, 12 — spent several hours driving back and forth Tuesday so she could vote for President Obama.

“This is how we can get the word out, that despite the devastation, we can still make an effort to have our voice heard,” she said, standing with other voters in the inch-deep dried silt on the blacktop, residue from seawater that flooded head-high through this area a week ago, leaving scores of houses flooded and cars ruined, and causing fires that destroyed more than 120 houses.

Regarding the storm, the cleanup and the election, Ms. McCormick said: “It’s all connected. We feel like we’ve lost so much, so we’re making an effort to vote because we don’t want to lose our voice, too.”

— COREY KILGANNON

New York City mobilized in preparation for the northeaster expected to hit the city tomorrow, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced that parks, playgrounds and beaches would close for 24 hours beginning at noon Wednesday.

Mr. Bloomberg said that the northeaster was expected to bring a surge in the water level of two to four-and-a-half feet at tomorrow’s high tides, roughly at 1 p.m. and midnight – far less than Hurricane Sandy brought ashore, but enough to re-flood low-lying areas.

The new storm, the mayor said, will carry winds of 25 to 35 miles an hour to the city, with gusts up to 55 miles an hour late Wednesday afternoon, as well as an inch of rain that may mix with sleet.

“We could have some snow on the ground and certainly snow on the trees,” the mayor said at a briefing at City Hall on Tuesday afternoon. “That makes the trees that already have their bases flooded more likely to fall over.”

Earlier Tuesday, the mayor announced that recycling was being discontinued temporarily to free up sanitation crews to work in the neighborhoods hit hardest by last week’s storm.

Garbage pickup, too, in areas not badly storm damaged, may be reduced, from three times a week to two or from two times a week to one, the mayor said.

“Just put your garbage out,” the mayor said, “and we’ll get to it.”

— ANDY NEWMAN

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BAY HEAD, N.J. — Just after daybreak, under a pink-hued sky, Shelly Coleman and her husband, Terrance, bundled up in winter jackets, left their sodden, water-damaged home and headed to the Bay Head firehouse, where a makeshift polling place had sprouted – literally overnight.

The couple walked through the sand-blown and mucky streets, sidestepping the occasional dead fish that lay on its side, a lifeless eye staring up at them. The firehouse, powered by an industrial-size generator that rumbled like the engine of a jetliner, was one of the few places with heat in this tiny seaside borough, just below Point Pleasant Beach.

“I’m going to vote in here all day long – it’s nice and warm,” declared Brent Wentz, 72, as he walked into the firehouse Tuesday about 7:30 a.m.

Ms. Coleman approached the borough’s clerk and exclaimed: “Guess what? We got water back on Friday. It was soooo exciting.”

“It’s the little things,” the municipal clerk, Patricia Applegate, 60, said and nodded. “You don’t realize these little things that you take for granted until they are gone.”

And so it went all morning at the Bay Head polling place, where residents of the 0.7-square-mile borough and poll workers provided one another with storm-recovery updates: Who has water? Hot water? A heat source? Propane?

Until Monday afternoon, state and county election officials were telling Bay Head residents that this pocket of Ocean County would have no local polling place. Most of the roughly 800 registered voters in Bay Head had evacuated and not returned, officials said. Instead, Bay Head voters would be sent inland, over the Lovelandtown Bridge, into Point Pleasant.

On Monday afternoon, however, Mayor William Curtis mounted a resistance.

“It was a fight. They didn’t want to deliver voting booths down here,” Mayor Curtis said, as voters streamed into the firehouse Tuesday. “They wanted us to go across the bridge because they didn’t think there was going to be enough people here to vote. I just said: ‘No, no, no. We have enough people here in town that will vote.’ This is us. This is our home and people are pulling together and we want to be here.”

The mayor and other residents pointed out that many of their cars were destroyed in the storm and driving out of town, through a National Guard checkpoint and back, was a hardship. They also cited the lack of available gas.

In the days leading to the election, several residents, their homes destroyed by a torrent of ocean and lake water, said they felt forgotten by the federal government, particularly FEMA.

Leslie Wentz, 58, said she had no heat and had not showered in days. She was using baby wipes to stay clean, she said. The election, she said, was not her top priority.

“I think everybody is just in survival mode,” she said. “Everybody is trying to survive. The town is doing a great job. The church is doing a great job, but I feel like the federal government is not coming in and doing anything. I can’t get anybody to help me.”

She said she voted for Mitt Romney. When asked about her choice for Congress, Ms. Wentz said: “I am so brain-dead right now. I don’t even know those people. I just want a new president. We have no heat.”

Ms. Coleman emerged from the voting booth and stopped to show a reporter her hands, blistered and raw from hours spent ripping up wet carpet in her home.

She also confided a worry, speaking in a low, almost secretive, tone, even though she stood outside and no one was around:

“Someone went and wrote Romney on the beach and we think we are going to get in trouble because they went and wrote Romney on the beach and Obama is going to stick it to us,” she said. “We were like, who is the person that did that because now if Obama wins, then we are not going to get aid. I think they saw it from the helicopter when Obama flew over. Is that terrible? I don’t know who did it. But it made some people nervous.”

— WENDY RUDERMAN

Almost 170 evacuees and homeless people are being moved from the John Jay High School campus, an imposing building in Park Slope, Brooklyn, that houses four schools, because of the outbreak of norovirus, a common and highly contagious intestinal bug that has hit 13 children since Friday, a Homeless Services Department spokeswoman said Tuesday.

The evacuees will be moved all together, and the school cleaned so that students can return on Thursday, a Department of Education spokeswoman said.

The building has been used as a shelter for evacuees of Hurricane Sandy and homeless people. Students returning to eight city school buildings being used as shelters were slated to go back on Wednesday, in some cases sharing the building with the shelter population.

The additional day’s delay at John Jay frustrated parents of children who attend school there.

“The D.O.E. should not be responsible for temporary housing,” said Loretta Redmond, a parent at Millennium Brooklyn High School, one of the schools, in an e-mail to Dennis Walcott, the chancellor of the Department of Education. “There are no health screenings being done at the shelter – never mind any other kind of screenings.”

The 13 children who were affected by the virus have been separated, with their families, from the healthy population in the shelter, said Jay Varma, deputy commissioner for disease control at the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.  He said the outbreak was not surprising considering the time of year and the fact that “these are schools and there wasn’t an expectation that they would be long-term facilities for the homeless.”

He said the virus could not live long after the school was disinfected and cleaned. “We don’t think there is a risk to students after they get back to school,” he said. If they do get sick, they will probably have acquired the virus in the community or from somebody else, he said.

It was unclear where the evacuees would be sent and whether that facility would also be a school.  Citing privacy, officials said only that they were being sent to the Bronx. “Evacuees will be moved to another facility this afternoon, where those who are ill will receive necessary treatment and be placed in separate space while they recover,” said a health department spokeswoman.

The Department of Education relocated its staff out of the building as soon as it learned about the “common but contagious stomach virus,” said Erin Hughes, a spokeswoman for the Education Department.

Ms. Redmond, the parent, was dubious that school would actually start on Thursday.

“I hope to really see that happen,” she said. “I am not convinced since we’ve been given so many stories.”

— JENNY ANDERSON

Though power has been restored to more than 1.7 million homes in New York since the storm hit, about 350,000 homes are still dark, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Tuesday.

“That’s down from what it was, about 2.1 million, but it’s still not O.K.,” he said. “It’s nice that other people have their power on, but it doesn’t mean much to you until you have your power on.”

More than 103,000 customers in Nassau County, 89,000 in Suffolk County, 66,000 in New York City and 63,000 in Westchester County are still waiting for their lights to go back on. Mr. Cuomo reiterated his annoyance with Consolidated Edison and the Long Island Power Authority for the pace of restorations, though the utilities have said they are working as fast as they possibly can.

“I don’t believe that their performance has been adequate, period,” Mr. Cuomo said.

— ANDY NEWMAN

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo called on American corporations Tuesday to contribute to the storm cleanup effort.

“We’re going to need home furnishings,” the governor said at a news conference. “We’re going to need lumber. We’re going to need furnaces.”

The governor thanked many companies, including Wal-Mart and PepsiCo, for having stepped forward already, but warned that he would come knocking at the doors of others.

Mr. Cuomo was joined at the news conference by a regional vice president at Home Depot, Tony Lemma, who announced that the chain was donating ten truckloads of cleaning products to be split between New York and New Jersey, containing cleaning supplies, chemicals, mops, brooms, shovels, dust masks and batteries.

Mr. Cuomo said he had been asked by a corporate leader what the state needed.

“I said, ‘We need everything,’” the governor said. “Entire households were lost. We appreciate, we need, and we request corporate America to come forward and be helpful.”

— ANDY NEWMAN

At a Hess station on 10th Avenue and 44th Street, a long line of taxis and sedans had come to a standstill on Tuesday morning. After two tankers refueled the station at 6 a.m., the supply was depleted by 8:40 a.m. Another tanker was said to be coming, so drivers parked their cars and waited under the watchful gaze of police officers. A half-dozen men toting empty gasoline containers stood on the sidewalk.

Fritz Petit-Homme, a Brooklyn cabdriver, said he had no choice but to sit and wait since his yellow cab was down to the last quarter tank. “It’s better to stay in line than to go,” he said. “Even if they deliver at 5, I wait.”

Mr. Petit-Homme, 54, said that he loses $30 to $35 every hour that he is parked instead of driving. He said that he tried to fill up in Brooklyn but that stations there were closed, or the lines were worse than in Manhattan. He said his friend, also a cabdriver, waited in line for five hours on Saturday at a Brooklyn gas station, only to find that the pump was tapped out when he got to the front. “It was so bad I didn’t even try,” said Mr. Petit-Homme, who opted instead to stay home.

Another driver, John Solomon, was third in the line but had to leave after two hours to pick up a client at Rockefeller Center at 11 a.m. There was still no tanker in sight. “What did I accomplish for two hours?” he said. “That’s a disappointment.”

Mr. Solomon, 50, who lives in Washington Heights, said he planned to conserve gas by turning off the heat, and keeping his foot off the gas pedal as much as possible. He said he would return to the Hess station tonight and if there was still no gas, he might even drive out to New Jersey.

“You know when you’re so close, but so far?” he said before driving away. “I’m like, ‘Really, no more gas?’”

— WINNIE HU

In New Jersey, state-mandated rules to enable displaced voters and emergency workers to vote apparently are being thwarted by uninformed local election officials and by technology.

Catherine Weiss, who runs the pro bono program at Lowenstein Sandler, a law firm and partner in the national Election Protection network, said late Tuesday morning that while the state rules allowed provisional voting outside voters’ home districts, “we are having issues with local polling places not permitting this to happen.”

She also said that while another state directive allows displaced voters to cast their ballots by e-mail or fax, local servers “have been overwhelmed by requests and produced backlogs of a couple of thousand emails that cannot be processed by the deadline.”

— SAM ROBERTS

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Bellevue Hospital Center, which evacuated hundreds of patients after Hurricane Sandy struck, is now on lockdown because of possible structural damage from the storm, according to hospital employees, who were informed of the decision on Tuesday morning. The hospital administration told employees that the lockdown was ordered so that the structural safety of the building could be assessed.

No one is being allowed into the building, on First Avenue and 27th Street in Manhattan, to retrieve possessions or to carry out work. But liquid nitrogen is being delivered to a number of laboratories. It was not clear from the announcement what the liquid nitrogen was supposed to protect.

But doctors said that Bellevue labs contained many perishable research projects and patient tests, including blood and urine tests. It is not clear whether those tests have been compromised. Ian Michaels, a spokesman for Bellevue, said he was checking.

The administration said it was not yet known how long the structural assessment would take or when people would be permitted back in the building.

Bellevue, the city’s flagship public hospital and major trauma center, housed 725 patients when the storm hit last week. It had to be evacuated after the rising waters of the East River gushed into its cavernous basement at the height of the storm. The hospital lost power and went to backup generators. When the basement fuel pumps failed, nurses, administrators and medical residents passed buckets of fuel up 13 flights of stairs to feed the generators through the night Monday until the National Guard was called in to relieve them. Critically ill patients had to be dragged down many flights of stairs on sleds. The last two patients, who were too sick to be carried, were taken out over the weekend, as some elevator service was restored.

— ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS

Susan Mugo, 36, an information technologist who had to evacuate from her home in Red Hook, Brooklyn, returned Tuesday morning to vote.

It was not easy. Her usual polling place in a public school was closed because of storm damage. There were no directions there to the alternate site. “I had to ask around,” she said. But eventually, she found herself standing in the line in the bright sunshine outside P.S. 27, waiting to cast her ballot.

@lheron Relocated Red Hook poll site from PS 15 to PS 27 gets set up 45 minutes late, volunteers working hard instagr.am/p/Rr9bB0HOmZ/ #WSJvote
— Jessica Lee (@jessicalee27) November 6, 2012

The school lies in a largely powerless area a few blocks from a blacked-out public-housing complex, the Red Hook Houses. A young woman stood outside the school beside a Volkswagen Passat decorated with Obama bumper stickers and held up a sign that read “shuttle,” offering residents of the Red Hook Houses rides to and from the polls.

Patrick Carroll, 30, an actor who lives in Red Hook, said that while he was not hit hard by the storm, it did motivate him politically.

“The storm made me start wanting to do more to make other people know what’s at risk,” he said. “With the storm, things are seeming more at risk than they were a couple weeks ago.”

He had worked a phone bank, making calls to voters in Nevada, Florida and Ohio.

“I really believe Obama’s the guy for the job,” he said.

— NATE SCHWEBER

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The line to vote at the Theater for the New City on First Avenue in the East Village wound around the corner onto Ninth Street. By 8:40 a.m., at least 175 people were patiently reading newspapers, manipulating smartphones and drinking coffee, advancing not even a foot a minute.

Alex Schroder, 23, said she hoped it would be no longer than an hour, because she had to get to her job as a preschool teacher.  “I am really excited to vote,” she said, “so I don’t mind waiting.”

— ANDREA KANNAPELL

At the Sirovich Senior Center on East 12th Street, the voters who arrived at 8:10 a.m. finished a little after 9 am. Several voters were given ballots that weren’t neatly torn from the book, so the scanner rejected them.

Maura Green, 30, a jewelry designer who had waited an hour in line, was one of them. When she returned to the poll workers’ table for a new ballot, they kept her standing there for another 15 or 20 minutes while they blamed each other for the problem (several other voters had returned to the table with rejected ballots as well) or attended to other voters in the growing line.

“It seemed the poll workers were not very organized or didn’t prepare,” Ms. Green said. “It was very chaotic. They didn’t seem to have a plan.”

Ms. Green said what was on her mind was “the economy. Things have gotten better for me over the last four years. I don’t know if it has to do with Obama.” Four years ago, she said, she was “underemployed” and working retail. Now she has a job as a designer and also sells her designs independently.

Paula Zanger, 49, who runs Orange Howell, a small company that makes silver ornaments, said that as a 15th generation American, she wanted to say something positive about the election and its outcome, but she could not. “Money and work are on my mind, definitely picking up work post-Sandy,” she said. “I think a lot’s going to open up psychologically after the election. Everyone’s on hold in some form or another.”

She added: “It’s about movement. It’s been very stalled out. I’m really good at what I do and I have a lot of experience, and I’ve never seen it like this. And I hate being that negative, because it’s not American and everybody knows it’s not good for business.”

Ms. Zanger supported President Obama and, because she pays for her own health insurance – and has some pre-existing conditions – she is counting on AFA. But she said she was more passionate about the Senate races than the presidential race.

“I have a very hard time understanding Obama vs. Mitt,” she said, “because it’s as if the majority of the population expects the pedagogy, one person, to change their lives after eight years of Bush, which on the scale of the country is quite impossible. Like big daddy’s gonna save us. It doesn’t work that way.”

— JOHN LELAND

On the third floor of a New York University building on East 13th Street, lines of voters snaked around corners and through hallways. Workers said residents would have to fill out ballots by hand, then have them scanned. But by a little after 9 a.m., workers said the scanner had stopped working.

Residents deposited their sheets in a box instead — if they could obtain one at all. Voters in the 59th election district were told to separate into two lines, one for last names beginning with A through L and another for M through Z.

“Ma,” one man said, as he reached the front of the M through Z line. A poll worker said she could not find his name, showing him her first page of entries, which began with a list of “Mac” names. He was not in the A through L book, either.

Mr. Ma, who did not give his first name, was instructed to vote by affidavit. He said he would, but was concerned that others in the city might also become lost in this alphabetical Bermuda Triangle.

“It’s O.K.,” the worker said. “There aren’t a lot of Asians in this district.”

— MATT FLEGENHEIMER

There were reports on Tuesday morning of problems with the vote-scanning machines that were being used in New York City for a presidential election for the first time. At Riverside Church in Manhattan, all three scanners were down, having jammed not long after voting began at 6 a.m. Poll workers said they expected to be counting “emergency ballots” manually until 4 a.m. Wednesday.

At a polling site on 80th Street on the East Side the story was much the same with all the scanning machines not functioning. Poll workers said that they were aware of the problem but that no one had arrived to repair the machines. Instead workers were relying on absentee ballots.

— NINA BERNSTEIN AND MICHAEL BARBARO

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The Long Island Power Authority, which said on Sunday that it expected to restore full power to the devastated Rockaways in Queens by the end of the week, has abandoned that target.

A spokeswoman for the utility said this morning that because the damage in the 11-mile-long peninsula was so extensive, restoring power on a “case-by-case basis” was the best LIPA could offer now. She said there was no timetable for full restoration.

— ANDY NEWMAN

In Forest Hills, Queens, Ann Dichter, 63, said she had never seen as busy a polling place in her 10-plus years there as she did Tuesday. Asked what was on her mind this day, she began a tirade against one of the presidential candidates, then stopped and summed up her mind-set thusly: “Women’s rights.”

— MICHAEL WILSON

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— THE NEW YORK TIMES

At Public School 163, on the Upper West Side, hundreds of voters waited on the sidewalk and packed into a gym for what turned out to be a chaotic voting situation. Voters had to wait in four lines — to determine which election district they lived in, to get a ballot, to fill out the ballot, and to get the ballot scanned. The process took an hour, there was no help for the disabled, the font on the ballot was tiny, and people became increasingly upset and were trying to advise election workers on how it might run better.

— MICHAEL PAULSON

Randy Harter, 66, an artist and designer, voted in New Rochelle, in Westchester County, at 6 a.m. and said his frustrating experience was symptomatic of incompetence in government. It was an issue that was on his mind because of what he described as an incompetent response to Hurricane Sandy in an area where thousands of houses still have no power more than a week after the storm struck.

He asked an election worker how to fill out a paper ballot he’d never seen before and was told: “Just fill it out.” When his ballot was inserted, the machine jammed. A second worker came over and brought another machine, and it too jammed. He eventually was given an envelope in which to place a ballot that would be hand-counted. The entire voting experience took 45 minutes, Mr. Harter said.

“Morons are running things, and nobody’s in charge,” he said afterward.

Still, he voted for President Obama, even though he is running the federal government.

“He inherited a government that’s incompetent, and he’s trying to fix it,” Mr. Harter said.

— JOSEPH BERGER

Susan Edgerley, editor of The New York Times’s Dining section, sent this dispatch from her polling place in Brooklyn.

At Public School 29 in Cobble Hill, the line was short at 6 a.m., but it took me 45 minutes to vote because I was sent to the wrong place twice (or rather, two different wrong places) and my district location was read incorrectly three times. Finally, a poll worker used an envelope to better read across the line and tell me my election district.

Poll workers were the usual mix — one tried to look me up by my first name, Susan, rather than my last name, Edgerley. Another was listing the date on voter ID cards as 2002. I overheard one worker telling another to go help out at a table because “they don’t know what they’re doing over there.” The same worker told another — the one who had twice told me the wrong district for my address — to sit down and stop yelling.

On my side of the school gymnasium, only one of two ballot scanners was working. Oh well.

Enterprising moms take advantage of long lines to vote at PS 29 in Cobble Hill by selling baked goods to benefit PTA. twitter.com/katetaylornyt/…

— Kate Taylor (@katetaylornyt) November 6, 2012

— SUSAN EDGERLEY

For New Jersey commuters seeking a way into Manhattan, options on Monday were few and unappealing.

But that has started to change today with the restoration of some PATH service. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said that limited PATH service would be reinstated, with fares waived, between Journal Square in Jersey City and 33rd Street in Manhattan, though stops would not be made at Christopher and Ninth Streets.

The flow of commuters started as a trickle early on Tuesday, judging from the Port Authority’s Twitter feed, which posted a picture of the Journal Square station.

First commuters arrive at Journal Sq PATH station today, on the first day of PATH resuming following Hurricane #Sandy. twitter.com/PANYNJ/status/…

— Port Authority NY&NJ (@PANYNJ) November 6, 2012

— CHRISTINE HAUSER

Authorities in Brick Township, a coastal town in New Jersey that was ravaged by Hurricane Sandy, have ordered residents in low-lying waterfront areas to evacuate ahead of a northeaster forecast to hit the region this week.

The storm “has the potential to strongly impact our town with high winds, storm surge and flooding,” a statement posted on the town’s Web site said Monday.

Residents in areas prone to flooding must evacuate by 6 p.m. Tuesday, the statement said.

The storm is expected to move into the region on Wednesday evening, producing torrential rain, high seas and wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour, according to the National Weather Service.

— MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

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Officer Matthew Youssef rapped several times on the glass door of a darkened single-family home in Howard Beach, Queens, on Monday afternoon before cracking it slightly and leaning inside.

“Anyone home?” he called out.

“Downstairs!” a man’s voice responded.

He and another officer, Santo Collardo, entered and descended into a wrecked basement to find out what food, water or other supplies the man, a 59-year-old school bus driver named Richard Eaton, might need.

The officers were a small part of a sprawling relief effort joined by the New York Police Department to assist those still reeling from Hurricane Sandy, bringing food to corners of the city without power and going door to door to inform residents huddled in their homes of the relief supplies nearby.

Deputy Inspector James Klein, directing the department’s effort from a parking lot at Aqueduct Racetrack in South Ozone Park, Queens, said the donations had poured in. By 2:30 p.m. Monday, he said, the police there had loaded two panel trucks, 10 police vans and a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus full of supplies, including boxes of Cheerios, blankets and cleaning supplies.

“Transportation is at a premium – sometimes we have to use our imagination,” Inspector Klein said.

Among the items most in demand a week after the storm hit, he said, were garbage bags and baby diapers as well as items that might not seem as obvious, such as garden hoses and dehumidifiers. “For getting the moisture out of homes,” he said.

That afternoon, Officers Youssef and Collardo were part of a group sent to the desolate corner of Cross Bay Boulevard and 164th Avenue near a Staples store. There, they popped out the legs on a small gray table and began stacking boxes of baby food, dog snacks and water among myriad other items – matzos, milk – across from the boarded-up hulk of a 7-Eleven store and a pizza parlor, where green graffiti read, “We are open OPEN.”

No sooner had the officers arrived on the corner, with no power to light the signals and not a pedestrian in sight, than residents began to emerge.

“Ma’am, do you need water?”

“Yes,” said Concetta Napolitano, 68, emerging from a black Mercedes with her husband, Neil. She said they had no power in their home nearby since the storm and had lost one car. She left with sterile cleaning wipes, a big bottle of water and a large package of Q-tips.

Another man, Santo Bonnano, also took water as well as two boxes of cereal and some dog food for the miniature schnauzer that he said had become the family’s only source of heat in their bone-cold home.

As in other hard-hit neighborhood, residents were attempting to keep up with life’s routines.

“I worked today,” said Mr. Eaton, the school bus driver. But, he added, “most of the kids weren’t going to school today.” A yellow minibus that he drove to public schools around the Upper West Side that morning sat in his driveway. He said the storm had destroyed three of his cars and a school bus.

A water line could be seen on a Pontiac parked across the street; it stopped just below the door handles.

Like many New Yorkers, members of the Police Department have faced their own storm-related hardships. Some are still without power or struggling to repair heavily damaged homes. The department has said the homes of more than 500 officers sustained “catastrophic damage” from the storm.

Five police unions, representing patrolmen up to captains, announced the creation of a fund to assist officers directly affected by the storm, a number they put at 1,500 officers. “They’ve lost the clothes off their backs” in some cases, said Roy T. Richter, president of the Captain’s Endowment Association. “And they still got to go to work.”

But among those coordinating relief, there were few complaints about the long hours or the difficulties they faced once home.

“Everybody’s got a story,” Inspector Klein said. “That’s what drives them to do what they’re doing.”

— J. DAVID GOODMAN

A conference for New York politicians scheduled for later this week in Puerto Rico was canceled on Monday in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The annual gathering, Somos el Futuro, was scheduled to begin Wednesday in San Juan. But several prominent elected officials, reluctant to lounge poolside while their constituents search for food and shelter, said earlier Monday that they would stay home this year because of the devastation from the storm.

— THOMAS KAPLAN

The National September 11 Memorial, which has been closed because of flooding during Hurricane Sandy, will reopen on Tuesday, Joseph C. Daniels, president and chief executive of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, said in a statement on Monday evening.

A deluge of at least seven feet of seawater flooded the main floor of the museum during last week’s storm, nearly immersing two fire trucks. Construction of the museum, which is 70 feet below the memorial plaza downtown, has been plagued by delays amid a financing dispute between the memorial foundation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

The floodwaters have been “substantially removed” and crews are now working to dry out the site, Mr. Daniels said.

The memorial will temporarily operate under limited hours, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., the statement said. The number of visitors will also be limited. Tickets that were reserved before the storm will be honored.

The 9/11 Memorial Visitor Center at 90 West Street will remain closed for now.

— MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ

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It was crowded in the parking lot beside MCU Park in Coney Island all day on Monday, but there were not many cars.

Instead, crowds of people outside the minor-league baseball stadium lined up to register for federal assistance or emergency supplies like blankets, water and dry ice; to charge their phones; or just to eat a warm meal, namely a hot dog, appropriate for the locale – Coney Island hosts a famous hot dog eating contest every year.

Seagulls circled above the lines, occasionally swooping down to grab a discarded bun. City buses converted to heating shelters also idled in the lot, where the elderly warmed up and children played while their parents inched forward in line.

“We have nothing,” said Ali King, 55, who added that he had been walking up 15 flights of stairs daily to bring his son blankets. “We come here on this line every day trying to ascertain something that can assist us to get through the night.”

A week had passed since Hurricane Sandy hit, depositing great amounts of sand several blocks inland, and leaving the streets blocked by rising piles of debris. In Coney Island, as in many other areas devastated by the storm, people had stayed in their apartments, despite plummeting temperatures and diminishing stores of food.

The reasons were several: Some were afraid of what would happen to their homes if they left; others were worried about losing their public-housing benefits like Section 8 if they went to shelters. Some people were undocumented immigrants and had no friends to call on, and feared any contact with the system.

After a week without services, though, the collective resolve had begun to break down, and people descended on the parking lot and other relief stations around Coney Island in greater numbers. The line was as diverse as the census findings for these tracts: there were elderly Russians, young African-Americans, families from Central America. They were now united in a common plight, holding empty cardboard boxes and turning their backs to a bitter wind.

— ANNIE CORREAL

Consolidated Edison responded to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s criticism on Monday evening by saying that the company had already restored four times as many customers as it ever had to restore after a storm.

“The 800,000 or so we’ve restored is equivalent to four Hurricane Irenes,” said John Miksad, senior vice president for electric operations at Con Edison. “We still have one hurricane to restore. It’s been a massive undertaking.”

The company still had 140,000 customers lacking power, down from 960,000, a total that was nearly five times the 200,000 Con Ed customers who lost power when Hurricane Irene swept through the region last year.

“I don’t know of a way we could have done this any faster,” Mr. Miksad said. “I think we’re doing well. I think we have a very efficient operation going. I can’t imagine a more efficient operation, but I’m always open to suggestions. I think we’re moving as fast as humanly possible.”

He said the number of customers in Westchester County without power had been pared to 62,000 from more than 210,000 at the peak. In Manhattan, the company had to reduce voltage by 5 percent to three networks downtown that have had power flowing again since the end of last week.

— PATRICK MCGEEHAN

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When a mammoth storm churned across New York City a week ago, some of the tallest denizens took much of the brunt. While trees lay sprawled across streets and sidewalks, the city’s more bucolic sanctuaries were where much of the worst damage took place.

Among them was the New York Botanical Garden, which lost more than 100 trees, including many ancient oaks, one of them 101 feet tall and thought to be about 200 years old. Read more.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Monday evening’s commute will require fortitude and patience. Long lines to reach buses outside the Port Authority Bus Terminal have formed with anxious passengers hoping to get home and Twitter is alighting with mob scenes like this:

Commute in NYC is an exercise in patience 2nite. @unclerush @mtainsider twitter.com/Shariemanon/st…
— GlamFairySharie (@Shariemanon) November 5, 2012

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority restored additional subway service on Monday, including the J train to Chambers Street. But many routes are still truncated or operating on a limited basis. Check mta.info to see how your subway line has been affected.

There are delays on the Brooklyn-bound 4 and 5 trains as a result of an investigation at the Barclays Center.

#ServAdv: Brooklyn-bound #4 #5 delayed due to @nypdnews investigation at Atlantic Ave-Barclays Center
— NYCT Subway Service (@NYCTSubwayScoop) November 5, 2012

Long Island Rail Road is operating on a modified schedule on all branches except the Long Beach branch, which remains idle. Trains on the Ronkonkoma branch are not running east of Ronkonkoma, and trains on the Montauk branch are not operating east of Speonk.

To ease congestion anticipated during the evening rush at Pennsylvania Station, the M.T.A. recommended passengers wait until 6:30 p.m.

#LIRR customers in Manhattan may wish to postpone eastbound travel until after 6:30pm. Penn Station expected to be less crowded by then.
— MTA (@MTAInsider) November 5, 2012

According to mta.info, Metro-North trains are operating on their regular schedules on the Hudson, Harlem and New Haven lines, with branch service resuming as well. The New Canaan branch has bus service in effect, with buses leaving stations 20 minutes before the scheduled train time.

Follow @NYCTSubwayScoop and @MTAInsider for latest updates.

— EMILY S. RUEB

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Monday that he had signed an executive order allowing voters living in areas most affected by Hurricane Sandy to vote by affidavit ballot at any polling place in the state.

“Just because you’re displaced doesn’t mean you should be disenfranchised,” Mr. Cuomo said at a news conference. He added, “Compared to what we have had to deal with the past week, this will be a walk in the park, going out and voting.”

New Jersey had taken a similar step, and good-government groups and some local elected officials had urged Mr. Cuomo to follow suit. Mr. Cuomo said displaced voters would receive the ballot specific to the area to which they had evacuated, meaning that in many cases, they would not be able to vote for candidates in local, legislative and Congressional races, but only for the two statewide contests on the ballot, president and United States Senate.

The executive order applies to voters in New York City and in Nassau, Suffolk, Rockland and Westchester Counties. Because the affidavit ballots will not be good for local races, Mr. Cuomo’s spokesman, Josh Vlasto, said, “we strongly urge only displaced people to utilize the affidavit ballot.”

Each polling place that was rendered unusable by the storm has been replaced with an alternate location, and voters who want to participate in their full slate of races can do so at the alternate location. Mr. Cuomo’s step was intended largely for people who have moved so far from their homes that voting Tuesday at their neighborhood’s temporary polling place would not be possible.

Several groups and public officials praised Mr. Cuomo’s action, including the New York City public advocate, Bill de Blasio, who described it as “exactly the kind of flexible problem solving we need from government as we recover from this storm.”

But one good-government group, Citizens Union, said it was concerned that a large number of voters would now seek to cast affidavit ballots without realizing that they would not be able to vote in local races, which in many cases are far more competitive than the two statewide contests.

“It’s just going to cause greater confusion in an already chaotic election and hurt down-ballot races where turnout will be very low,” said Dick Dadey, the executive director of Citizens Union. “It’s a well-intentioned move, but its consequences are not ultimately helpful.”

Mr. Cuomo, asked about the difficulty of voting for those whose communities had been evacuated or whose polling places had changed, said, “It is what it is. You have people who are displaced. We’re trying to do the best we can. We want everyone to vote. We want to make it as easy as possible.”

— THOMAS KAPLAN

The gasoline supply was slowly improving in the New York City region on Monday, according to AAA.

Here is the organization’s updated estimates of the number of gas stations that are open in areas damaged by Hurricane Sandy:

• New York City: 60 to 65 percent are open (compared with 40 to 45 percent open on Friday)
• New Jersey: 55 to 60 percent are open (compared with 45 to 50 percent open on Friday)
• Long Island: 50 to 55 percent are open (compared with 35 to 40 percent open on Friday)

Still, long lines continue in parts of northern New Jersey, New York City and Long Island. The primary problem remains a lack of electricity rather than low supplies. Many gas stations remain without power, which results in increased demand at the limited number of pumps that are open. There also have been logistical challenges in delivering gasoline to open stations, but these problems are expected to diminish now that pipelines, distribution terminals and harbors have reopened in many areas.

— WINNIE HU

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, speaking at a briefing on Monday afternoon, said that he was concerned about a strong Northeaster forecast to hit the area on Wednesday and that it could complicate recovery efforts from Hurricane Sandy. He said he was concerned about the quantity of debris now on streets and sidewalks as people have discarded items damaged by flooding. As a result, he was ordering local communities to collect it before the new storm hit and said they would be reimbursed for any additional costs.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES

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As Coney Island residents lined up on Monday afternoon for emergency supplies in a parking lot in the shadow of the famous parachute ride, not far away, the secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, talked to reporters next to a trailer belonging to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Her message was equal parts reassurance and caution.

The reassurance was that federal resources would continue to be distributed where they were most needed and that the gasoline shortage that had left thousands in the region waiting in long lines would soon ease.

The caution concerned the storm predicted for the region later this week. “We know that there’s a nor’easter coming our way and it’s going to bring with it some more wind, some more rain, and possibly some more flooding and some more surge,” Ms. Napolitano said. “Everything that people did to get ready for Sandy, we need to do for the nor’easter.”

“Please listen to your local officials,” she added. “If they advise you to evacuate again, please evacuate.” She warned that some residents might lose power again and emphasized that the federal government would continue to bring in crews from around the country to help Consolidated Edison and other utility companies restore power.

She said that Sandy had hit public housing buildings particularly hard and that for their residents and others displaced by storm damage, “no option is off the table” for temporary housing, including rental units, hotel and motel rooms, FEMA trailers and prefabricated units.

To date, Ms. Napolitano said, 206,000 people had registered with FEMA and $192 million in FEMA aid had been distributed, along with 9.2 million gallons of water and 6.3 million meals.

The  military has sent 12 million gallons of unleaded gasoline and 10 million gallons of diesel to the region, Ms. Napolitano said. “The gasoline is here; it’s just a matter of getting it distributed” to stations, she said.

Nevertheless, she advised people for the time being  to conserve gasoline.

— ANNIE CORREAL

Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is a Republican. Bruce Springsteen is a Democrat. Mr. Christie is a huge fan of Mr. Springsteen, but political differences have stood between them. Mr. Springsteen has never invited Mr. Christie backstage at any of the dozens of his concerts that Mr. Christie has attended.

So who was able to get Mr. Springsteen on the phone for Mr. Christie? Their newly mutual friend, the president of the United States, of course.

Read more about the storm’s strange bedfellows on The Caucus.

— THE NEW YORK TIMES