City stirs to life as Jersey coast counts the cost
New York City was slowly coming back to life yesterday, starting with the partial reopening of vital subways. However, neighbouring New Jersey was stunned by coastal devastation and the news that thousands of people in one city were still stranded by increasingly fetid floodwaters.
Forecasting firm Eqecat estimated the total US damage at $US50bn, making it the second-costliest storm in the country's history, after Hurricane Katrina. The estimate includes property damage and lost business.
Around the country, the cost in human lives has surpassed 90.
New Jersey's once-pristine Atlantic coastline, famous for Bruce Springsteen and the TV show Jersey Shore, was shattered, its houses, businesses and boardwalks wrecked.
Warnings rose again about global warming and the prospect of more severe weather to come.
"The next 50 to 100 years are going to be very different than what we've seen in the past 50 years," said S. Jeffress Williams, a scientist emeritus at the US Geological Survey's Woods Hole Science Centre in Massachusetts. The sea level was rising fast and destructive storms were becoming more frequent, he said.
Across the Hudson River from New York City, the floodwaters were slowly receding in the city of Hoboken, where an estimated 20,000 people had remained in their homes. The National Guard was helping with evacuations, but residents were warned not to walk around in water tainted with chemicals from the heavily industrial region and sewage.
New Jersey residents were urged to conserve water. At least 1.7 million customers remained without electricity there, and fights broke out as people waited in long queues for petrol.
In New York, more than 4.6 million homes and businesses were still without power, down from a peak of 8.5 million.
New Yorkers streamed into the city as service began to resume on commuter trains and subways. The three major airports and the New York Stock Exchange reopened.
But downtown Manhattan remained in the dark roughly south of the Empire State Building after floodwaters knocked out electricity.
New York's Governor ordered deliveries of food and drinking water to help elderly and poor people effectively trapped on upper floors of housing complexes in the powerless area. New York's temperature dipped close to 0C on Wednesday night, local time.
"Our problem is making sure they know that food is available," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said yesterday, as officials expressed concern about people having to haul water from fire hydrants up darkened flights of stairs.
In Manhattan's Chelsea neighbourhood, Mary Wilson, 75, walked downstairs from her 19th-floor apartment for the first time yesterday because she had run out of bottled water and felt she was going to faint.
"I did a lot of praying: 'Help me to get to the main floor.' Now I've got to pray to get to the top," she said, buying water from a convenience store. "I said, 'I'll go down today or they'll find me dead'."
The superstorm's effects, though much weakened, continued yesterday. Snow drifts as high as 1.5m piled up in West Virginia, where the former hurricane merged with two winter weather systems as it went inland.
Across the region, people stricken by the storm pulled together, some providing comfort to those left homeless, others offering hot showers and electrical outlets for charging mobile phones to those without power.
Bloomberg also ordered residents to share cars. Television footage showed heavy traffic crawling into Manhattan as police turned away cars that carried fewer than three people - a rule aimed at easing the congestion that paralysed the city earlier in the week.
At a petrol station near Brooklyn's Coney Island the queue was 100 cars long. People shouted and honked, and a station employee said he had been spat on and had coffee thrown at him. After suffering the worst disaster in the New York subway system's 108-year-old history, the trains were rolling again - at least some of them. More than a dozen of the lines would offer some service, but none below Manhattan's 34th Street.
But most of New Jersey's mass transit systems remained shut, leaving hundreds of thousands of commuters stuck on clogged highways and in long lines at petrol stations. Atlantic City's casinos remained closed.
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