Patience also wore thin in other parts of the New York area amid lines that were once again painfully long — lines for free meals, lines for buses to take people where crippled subways could not, lines for gasoline that stretched 30 blocks in Brooklyn.
In Lower Manhattan, the power restoration started around 5 p.m. in the East Village. The network in the East Village, known as Cooper Square, serves about 67,000 customers between 14th and Canal Streets. The Chelsea neighborhood sparked to life about 45 minutes later, bringing back power to an additional 25,000 customers between 14th and 31st Streets on the West Side.
The next big network came back to life around 7:30 p.m., when 30,000 customers east of Fifth Avenue between 14th and 31st Streets were once again able to turn their lights on.
The return of power to apartment buildings in New York was greeted with cheers in many parts of the city, according to multiple reports from witnesses on social networks.
In other boroughs and in the suburbs, the prognosis for full restoration was grimmer. In many parts of the region, utility companies forecast that people might be without power until the middle of November. On Long Island, more than 500,000 customers of the Long Island Power Authority still had no power on Friday evening, or any estimate of when it would return.
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| Broad Channel, Queens. Patience wore thin as the region struggled.
The American Red Cross struggled on Friday to reassure beleaguered New York City residents that its disaster-relief efforts were at last getting up to speed, after the agency’s delayed arrival in devastated areas of Staten Island, Brooklyn and Queens drew intense criticism.
As of Friday, the Red Cross said, 25 of its emergency response vehicles — retrofitted ambulances each carrying 2,000 pounds of water, meals and snacks — had begun making their way through the hardest hit parts of the five boroughs. More were on the way, the agency promised.
The Red Cross had not yet opened the three temporary mobile kitchens that it announced on Thursday would be set up on Staten Island, in Riis Park in the Rockaways, and at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens, the agency confirmed. The kitchens, which can produce 10,000 meals a day, would begin operating by Saturday, it said.
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| The bodies of two more storm victims were found on Staten Island.
They brought to seven the number of bodies found in Midland Beach, a low-lying area of bungalows and newer two-story houses that was hit by the surge that accompanied Hurricane Sandy on Monday.On Staten Island, which even in good times is often referred to as the city’s forgotten borough, desperation and anger were especially intense.
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New Yorkers faced long lines for food handouts on Friday.
Across the city, New Yorkers who had found each other through Facebook and Twitter, churches and community groups, City Hall and local elected officials, tried in ways small and large to ease the devastation left by Hurricane Sandy. Several volunteers said the relief provided by their small-scale community efforts was the first to arrive in some of the most hard-hit parts of the city, outpacing large organizations like the Red Cross and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
A government survey has found that roughly two-thirds of the gasoline stations in the New York metropolitan region do not have fuel to sell.
With gas lines stretching for hours, frustrated commuters often searching for open stations in vain and little reliable information about where gas can be found, the U.S. Energy Information Administration began conducting a survey of supply conditions on Friday.
Its first report was not good.
Perhaps more so than in any other place in the city, the loss of power for people living in public housing projects forced a return to a primal existence. Opened fire hydrants became community wells. Sleep-and-wake cycles were timed to sunsets and sunrises. People huddled for warmth around lighted gas stoves as if they were roaring fires. Darkness became menacing, a thing to be feared.
Students at 65 “severely damaged” public schools will be temporarily reassigned to new schools, and will resume classes on Wednesday, Dennis M. Walcott, the schools chancellor, announced late Friday afternoon.
The rest of the city’s schoolchildren will return to class Monday,
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