The Fun Town Pier in Seaside Heights, N.J., has been heavily damaged. Owner Billy Major surveys the damage Wednesday. Only four of the rides on the pier survived superstorm Sandy. (Photo: David Gard, AP)
NEW YORK -- The cleanup of miles of New Jersey shorefront ripped
apart by Superstorm Sandy has just begun, but New York City resumed its
normal frenetic pace by getting back its vital subways.
The
decision to reopen undamaged parts of the United States' largest transit
system Thursday came as the region struggled to recover from a storm,
which killed more than 140 people as it swept north from the Caribbean
and left more than 5 million without power in the U.S. alone.
HOW TO DONATE TO OPERATION SANDY RELIEF
Two
of the region's main airports opened Wednesday and officials promised
that the third, LaGuardia Airport, would return to service Thursday.
Actors and eager audiences brought darkened Broadway theaters back to
life. And New Yorkers packed on to buses that returned for the first
time to city streets since the storm, joining a throng of gridlocked
traffic that navigated the city without working stop lights.
Across
the region, people stricken by the storm pulled together, in some cases
providing comfort to those left homeless, in others offering hot
showers and electrical outlets for charging cellphones to those without
power.
The spirit of can-do partnership extended even to
politicians, who at least made the appearance of putting their
differences aside to focus together on Sandy.
"We are here for you," President Obama said in New Jersey while
touring a ravaged shore. "We are not going to tolerate red tape. We are
not going to tolerate bureaucracy."
Obama joined Republican Gov.
Chris Christie, who had been one of the most vocal supporters of
Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, to tour the ravaged coast.
But the two men spoke only of helping those harmed by the storm.
That
was already beginning Wednesday, when masses of people walked
shoulder-to-shoulder across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan for work,
reversing the escape scenes from the Sept. 11 terror attack and the
blackout of 2003. They reached an island, where many people took the
lack of power and water and transportation as a personal challenge.
On
Third Avenue, people gathered like refugees around a campfire. But
instead of crackling flames, their warmth came from more advanced
technology: a power strip that had been offered to charge cellphones.
At
a fire hydrant in New York's West 16th Street, 9-year-old Shiyin Ge and
her brother, 12-year-old Shiyuan Ge, stood in line to fill up buckets
of water. But unlike the adults, the two kids held plastic Halloween
candy pails painted with grinning jack-o-lanterns.
"There's no water in our house," said Shiyin Ge, who had planned to dress up as a ladybug for Halloween.
After
suffering the worst disaster in its 108-year-old history, the subways
were to roll again - at least some of them. More than a dozen of the
lines would offer some service, but none below Manhattan's 34th Street, a
line of demarcation in the city separating the hardest-hit residents
from those who escaped the brunt.
Downtown Manhattan, which
includes the city's financial district, Sept. 11 memorial and other
tourist sites, was still mostly an urban landscape of shuttered bodegas
and boarded-up restaurants, where people roamed in search of food, power
and a hot shower.
To get there from Brooklyn or Queens, commuters
who would normally zoom beneath the East River in tunnels that flooded
will have to take shuttle buses, adding to the enormous stress already
being placed on gridlocked Manhattan streets.
"We are going to need some patience and tolerance," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday.
The
airports and subways weren't the only transportation systems returning
to the region. Suburban trains started running for the first time on
Wednesday, and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor was to take commuters from
city to city for on Friday for the first time since the storm.
It
is clear, however, that restoring the region to its ordinarily frenetic
pace could take days - and that rebuilding the hardest-hit communities
and the transportation networks could take considerably longer.
There were still only hints of the economic impact of the storm.
Forecasting
firm IHS Global Insight predicted it would cause $20 billion in damage
and $10 billion to $30 billion in lost business. Another firm, AIR
Worldwide, estimated losses up to $15 billion.
About 6 million
homes and businesses were still without power, mostly in New York and
New Jersey. Electricity was out as far west as Wisconsin in the Midwest
and as far south as the Carolinas.
In New Jersey, signs of the
good life that had defined wealthy shorefront enclaves like Bayhead and
Mantoloking lay scattered and broken: $3,000 barbecue grills buried
beneath the sand and hot tubs cracked and filled with seawater. Nearly
all the homes were seriously damaged, and many had entirely disappeared.
"This," said Harry Typaldos, who owns the Grenville Inn in Mantoloking, "I just can't comprehend."
Most
of the state's mass transit systems remained shut down, leaving
hundreds of thousands of commuters braving clogged highways and
quarter-mile lines at gas stations. Atlantic City's casinos remained
closed. Christie postponed Halloween until Monday, saying
trick-or-treating wasn't safe in towns with flooded and darkened
streets, fallen trees and downed power lines.
Farther north in
Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, nearly 20,000
residents remained stranded in their homes, amid accusations that
officials have been slow to deliver food and water. One man blew up an
air mattress and floated to City Hall, demanding to know why supplies
hadn't gotten out. At least one-fourth of the city's residents are
flooded and 90 percent are without power.
On New York's Long
Island, bulldozers scooped sand off streets and tow trucks hauled away
destroyed cars, while residents tried to find a way to their homes to
restart their lives. Joanne and Richard Kalb used a rowboat to reach
their home in Mastic Beach, filled with 3 feet of water.
Her
husband, exasperated by the futility of their effort, posted a sign on a
telephone pole, asking drivers to slow down: "Slow please no wake."
Associated Press