Cold adds to storm-area woes

NEW YORK — Shivering victims of Hurricane Sandy went to church Sunday to pray for deliverance as cold weather settling in across the New York metropolitan region - and another powerful storm forecast for the middle of the week - added to their misfortunes and deepened the gloom.

With overnight temperatures sinking into the 30s and hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses still without electricity, New York City officials handed out blankets and urged people to go to temporary warming shelters set up during the day at senior centers.

At the same time, government leaders began to grapple with a daunting, longer-term problem: where to find housing for the tens of thousands of people whose homes could be uninhabitable for weeks or months because of a combination of storm damage and cold weather.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said 30,000 to 40,000 New Yorkers may need to be relocated - a monumental task in a city where housing is scarce and fiercely expensive - though he said that number would probably drop to 20,000 within a couple of weeks as power is restored in more places.

On a basketball court flanked by apartment buildings without power in the Far Rockaway section of Queens, volunteers for the city handed out bagels, diapers, water, blankets and other necessities. Genice Josey filled a garbage bag until it was bulging.

“Nights are the worst because you feel like you’re outside when you’re inside,” said Josey, who sleeps under three blankets and wears long johns under her pajamas. “You shiver yourself to sleep.”

Six days after Sandy slammed into the New Jersey coastline in an assault that killed more than 100 people in 10 states, gasoline shortages persisted across the region, though odd-even rationing got under way in northern New Jersey in an echo of the gas crises of the 1970s. More than 900,000 homes and businesses were still without power in New Jersey, and nearly 700,000 in New York City, its northern suburbs and Long Island.

On Sunday, gas lines seemed slightly shorter in some places, but many stations were still closed. Authorities have set up three fuel depots in New Jersey so doctors and nurses can get up to 15 gallons of gas to go to work.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that tankers and barges were on the way to help alleviate shortages. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announced that Port Elizabeth, N.J., reopened Sunday to receive its first shipment of cargo since it was closed by Sandy. All other Port Authority seaports remained closed.

Meanwhile, the Haitian government called on other countries and international organizations to provide emergency humanitarian aid after Sandy caused major damage to the impoverished nation.

The eye of the storm passed west of Haiti the night of Oct. 24. But its rain-heavy outer bands soaked the southern coast and capital for much of that week, causing many rivers to overflow. Authorities said the storm destroyed 70 percent of the crops in Haiti’s south and caused widespread deaths of livestock.

Haitian officials said that as many as 54 people died. Sandy was blamed for 17 more deaths in other Caribbean countries.

With more subways running and most city schools reopening today, large swaths of the city were getting back to something resembling normal. But the coming week could bring new challenges, namely an Election Day without power in hundreds of polling places, and a nor’easter expected to hit the area by Wednesday, with the potential for 55 mph gusts and more beach erosion, flooding and rain.

Voting machines in hundreds of locations will be operating on generator power, some polling stations are being moved and there are likely to be delays in reporting election results in a few closely contested races because of extended deadlines for counting ballots cast by mail.

Churchgoers packed the pews Sunday in parkas, scarves and boots and looked for solace in faith.

At the chilly Church of St. Rose in Belmar, N.J., its streets still slippery with foul-smelling mud, Roman Catholic Bishop David O’Connell assured parishioners: “There’s more good, and there’s more joy, and there’s more happiness in life than there is the opposite. And it will be back.”

In the heart of the Staten Island disaster zone, the Rev. Steve Martino of Movement Church headed a volunteer effort that had scores of people delivering supplies in grocery carts and cleaning out ruined homes.

After the abrupt cancellation of Sunday’s New York City Marathon, some of those who had been planning to run the 26.2-mile race through the city streets instead volunteered their time, handing out toothbrushes, batteries, sweatshirts and others supplies on Staten Island.

Thousands of other athletes from around the world ran anyway inside Central Park, where a little more than four laps around it amounted to a marathon. “A lot of people just want to finish what they’ve started,” said Lance Svendsen, organizer of a group called Run Anyway.

Cuomo said New York state is facing “a massive, massive housing problem” for those whose neighborhoods or buildings are in such bad shape that they won’t have power for weeks or months.

“I don’t know that anybody has ever taken this number of people and found housing for them overnight,” Bloomberg said. “We don’t have a lot of empty housing in this city,” he added. “We’re not going to let anybody go sleeping in the streets. ... But it’s a challenge, and we’re working on it.”

Many residents in New Jersey, on Long Island and in Connecticut face a similar problem.

Bloomberg and Cuomo gave no details of where and how the victims might be housed.After Hurricanes Katrina and Rita smashed the Gulf Coast in 2005, hundreds of thousands of victims were put up by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in trailers, hotels, cruise ships and apartments across several states for months and even years.

FEMA announced Sunday that it would begin providing transitional housing to those who could not return to their homes. As of Sunday morning, 164,000 residents of Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York had applied for aid and the agency had approved more than $137 million in financial assistance.

On Staten Island, emergency management officials distributed leaflets urging people to take shelter from the cold. But “people are apprehensive and don’t want to leave their houses. It’s a definite problem,” said Fred Melendez, who helped run a shelter at Tottenville High School that was nearly empty of storm victims Sunday afternoon.

Information for this article was contributed by Jennifer Peltz, Michael Hill, Michael Rubinkam, Cara Anna, David B. Caruso, Tom Hays, Michael Hill, Hillel Italie, Christina Rexrode, Jim Fitzgerald and Ben Nuckols of The Associated Press; and by Michael Schwirtz, Michael M. Grynbaum, Mary Pilon, Eric Lipton, Steve Eder, Vivian Yee and Thomas Kaplan of The New York Times.