Severe fuel shortages yesterday threatened New York’s attempt to recover from superstorm Sandy as cold temperatures added to almost a week of misery exacerbated by flooded homes, limited public transportation and fraying tempers.
Crews are working hard to restore supplies to schools, set to reopen today, and to polling places for tomorrow’s presidential election
But on the bright side, power was restored to nearly all of Manhattan on Saturday after flooding plunged the lower half of New York’s most densely populated borough and famous skyline into darkness.
Manhattan will no longer resemble “some sort of ghost town or horror movie,” said Bob McGee, a spokesman for utility company Con Edison.
Crews were also working to restore supplies to schools, set to reopen today, and to polling places for tomorrow’s presidential election.
However, 40 per cent of those who lost power, or somewhere under 900,000 people, continued to experience widespread outages that could last for as long as another week, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo told reporters.
For many, that meant no heating just as temperatures are dropping in the New York area, with a windy, rainy autumn storm forecast for Wednesday.
On Long Island, 550,000 people are without power, down from 1.2 million people initially, Cuomo said.
Overall, 2.5 million customers remain without power across seven states that were in Sandy’s path, the US Department of Energy said.
As New Jersey police raised the state’s death toll to 22, increasing the overall US total to at least 109, the biggest hurdle to recovery continued to be a severe lack of gasoline.
Huge lines of cars and people on foot clutching canisters snaked back from petrol stations, and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie announced rationing. Starting on Saturday, drivers with licence plates ending in an even number were only allowed to fill up on even-numbered dates, while those whose plates end in odd numbers had to wait for odd-numbered dates.
Meanwhile, New York officials announced the deployment of military fuel trucks offering 10 gallons (38 litres) of gasoline to drivers free of charge.
Cuomo said the critical situation should ease rapidly since delays in the arrival of fuel ships had been remedied.
“Eight million gallons of fuel have been delivered,” he said.
“Twenty-eight million gallons will be delivered over the next two days, so you will see quickly an abatement of the pressure on the fuel system.”
“You don’t have to panic,” he added.
New figures from the federal Energy Information Administration said 38 per cent of gas stations around New York were still out of order, sharply down from Friday’s 67 per cent.
Relief was slower than hoped for drivers, who were told to stay away from makeshift fuel stations on the first day of the scheme to give priority to emergency vehicles.
At one site in the Bronx, the promised fuel tanker had not arrived by late afternoon, according to an AFP correspondent.
But in a piece of good news, the New York subway system was 80 per cent up and running. The transit authority ended the suspension of fares that had allowed New Yorkers to ride free during the calamity’s immediate aftermath.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg also announced that schoolchildren would be back in class today, although there were 65 schools out of service.
The military said it had given emergency officials one million meals to distribute to the needy in New York and New Jersey, and would bring a further million next week.