Four days after Hurricane Sandy, the effort to secure enough gas for the region moved to the forefront of recovery work. In New York, the Taxi Commission warned of a thinner fleet.
Michael Green, a spokesman for AAA, provided a picture of the gasoline shortage in the metropolitan region.
Long Island: 30 percent to 35 percent of 1,000 stations are open.
New York City: 35 percent to 40 percent of 800 stations are open.
New Jersey: 35 percent to 40 percent of 3,000 stations are open.
New York State: 75 percent of 5,250 stations are open.
With traffic somewhat improved from yesterday but some of the high-occupancy-vehicle checkpoints at Manhattan’s entrances doubling as chokepoints, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg lifted the three-occupant limit for taxis and livery cars coming in around 8:15 a.m.
By 9:30 a.m., the lines outside the Barclays Center in Brooklyn for free shuttle buses into Manhattan were so long that city Transportation Department workers were reported to be flagging down Manhattan-bound motorists and asking them to pick up passengers from the overflow.
With subway trains still unable to get over or under the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan because of flooding and power problems, service between the two boroughs is by shuttle bus, with departures from the transportation hub at the Barclays Center and from Hewes Street on the border of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn.
Some New Yorkers whose homes lost electricity may have to wait more than two weeks to get it back — especially if their homes are the only ones on the block that lost power during the storm, utility officials said Thursday. the 220,000 customers in Manhattan who lost power after the East River swamped a Con Edison power plant at the east end of 14th Street should have power again by Saturday.
The aftermath of Hurricane Sandy has temporarily created two cities in Manhattan: one where restaurants serve hot food and warm water runs from the tap, and another where the phones are dead and a shower is like a dream.
At the boundary, around 40th Street on the East Side, an unusual makeshift community has sprung up, one where the basic building blocks of a New York neighborhood — a pizza place, an unremarkable deli, a bank — have become an oasis.
Wednesday evening and into the night, the people from downtown emerged from the cold, enveloping darkness by the hundreds, some with flashlights, some with towels just in case they found a place to shower, some with gallon containers to fill with water to flush the toilet. They stepped into the bright Midtown at East 39th Street at the place where the blackout ends.
As drivers and pedestrians waited in lines 100 cars deep to fill their tanks and many stations ran out, there were whiffs of desperation mixed with gasoline fumes
The soggy marshes and still-damp ruins of homes on Staten Island [photo below] yielded a grim postscript to the toll from Hurricane Sandy on Thursday, as search teams discovered more bodies where the storm’s giant wall of water had smashed its way through. It became apparent that Staten Island would be the city’s tragic epicenter of casualties: 19 of the city's 40 victims have been found here.
Floodwaters rose to about four feet inside the Fairway supermarket in Red Hook, Brooklyn. It is expected to be months for it can re-open.
As parts of the city edged toward some semblance of normal on Thursday, tens of thousands of people who depend on essential home medical care remained tenuously connected to lifesaving services by agencies like Partners in Care, an affiliate of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York.
At the Visiting Nurse Service of New York alone, more than 5,000 nurses, aides, social workers and others were out serving patients around the city during and after the storm