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| The Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel was flooded. The waters surrounding New York City have been rising an inch a decade, and the pace is picking up. |
The patchy recovery from Hurricane Sandy exposed a fractured region on Saturday. The lights flickered on in Manhattan neighborhoods that had been dark for days, and New York’s subways rumbled and screeched through East River tunnels again.
But in shorefront stretches of Staten Island and Queens that were all but demolished, and in broad sections of New Jersey and Long Island, gasoline was still almost impossible to come by, electricity was still lacking, temperatures were dropping and worried homeowners wondered when help would finally arrive.
Mr. Bloomberg visited the devastated neighborhoods in the Rockaway section of Queens, where he voiced concern about chilly temperatures and hypothermia. “It’s cold, and it really is critical that people stay warm, especially the elderly,” he said at a City Hall briefing, urging people to go to shelters if they did not have heat. He added, “We are committed to making sure that everybody can have a roof over their head and food in their stomachs and deal with the cold safely.”
In many places that the storm pounded in its relentless push into the Northeast, there was a profound sense of isolation, with whole towns on Long Island still cut off from basic information, supplies and electricity. People in washed-out neighborhoods said they felt increasingly desperate.
Drivers in New Jersey faced 1970s-style gasoline rationing imposed by Gov. Chris Christie. He said that he could not estimate how long New Jersey’s gas rationing system would have to remain in place, adding that the biggest problem for the state’s gas stations was power even more than supply at this point.
The No. 4, 5, 6 and 7 train lines were restored to full service as of Saturday morning, state officials said.
Gas-station shortages may take several days to be fully resolved, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a briefing Saturday.