LITTLE ROCK — Students were told to dress warmly as they trickled back to chilly classrooms Monday, and many trains and buses were rolling again, but a week after Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on the region, the return to work and school was still a challenge as the New York City area struggled to recover.
Long lines at bus stops, impossibly packed trains and padlocked platforms attested to the difficulties of the first Monday commute with a public transit system still hobbled from the storm, particularly in the suburbs on Long Island and in New Jersey.
Buses arrived to take homeless men, uprooted hospital patients and evacuated residents from a makeshift shelter in Midtown Manhattan at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts, which was closed to students, to another location. That move was part of the city’s effort to consolidate the eight school buildings that are being used as shelters to free up space for students to return to classes.
But Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has emphasized repeatedly the importance of restoring order to schools, said Monday that many of those shelters were not likely to clear out quickly.
The morning was filled with reports of commuters left standing as suburban trains and buses filled to capacity passed them by. Making matters worse, officials warned that persistent gasoline shortages would swell the number of people vying for what mass transportation was available.
Long lines of cars still crawled slowly toward the pumps. Bloomberg said the police had assigned an officer to every gas station that was open.
More than 700,000 customers in New York and New Jersey still awaited the return of power. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York called the performance of the utility companies “unacceptable” and again suggested they might be punished for moving too slowly to restore power after Sandy.
Consolidated Edison responded by saying the company had already restored power to four times as many customers as it has ever had to restore after a storm.
Many children in New York City returned to schools that had no heat, and others had to adjust to different schedules and new ways of getting to school because the places they had attended were still too damaged to open. School districts across the region also reopened, but many remained closed and were not scheduled to reopen until next Monday.
Bloomberg, speaking at Public School 195 in Brooklyn, said school attendance throughout the city was about 86 percent and that about 94 percent of the schools had opened. He expected the numbers to be higher when classes resume Wednesday, after they close today for the election.
“It was a relatively successful first day,” the mayor said.
About 73,000 of the city’s 1.1 million public-school students were told to stay home Monday while education officials scrambled to ready temporary space for them at functioning schools or to get at least partial power on at schools they usually attend.
At Public School 2 in Chinatown, power was on but there was no hot water or heat, and food in the freezer had to be thrown out.
“We expect to carry on as usual,” said the acting interim principal, Bessie Ng.
She e-mailed teachers telling them to dress warmly.
“The students normally come with many layers,” Ng said.
If they do not, she said, staff members will find something warm for them.
Bloomberg named Brad Gair, 52, a former Federal Emergency Management Agency official, to supervise the city’s storm response.
The mayor also appointed four directors to serve as the primary points of contact for residents, community groups and elected officials in the hardest-hit communities.
The drive into Manhattan from New Jersey remained an ordeal, with delays of 60 to 90 minutes.
For many people, Monday was the first day back on the job after Hurricane Sandy swept through the region, making landfall last Monday night with violent winds, flooding and rains.
Those who were dealing only with the frustrations and impatience of a commute in a city not yet back on its feet were better off.
As of Monday morning, the death toll from the storm stood at 106 people in 10 states, making it the deadliest storm to hit the East Coast since the blizzard and floods of January 1996, which killed 187 people, according to federal data reported by The Associated Press. Forty of the dead were in New York City, a number that was revised from 41 after one city death was determined not to be related to the storm.
Thousands of people are now dealing with being homeless, trying to salvage belongings from the silt of what was left of their homes or still cleaning out mounds of sand from what remained. While in some neighborhoods patience was wearing thin, city authorities have set up food distribution centers. The city was also providing mobile medical vans in Brooklyn and Queens, equipped with doctors who can fill out prescriptions in neighborhoods where many drugstores are still closed. The vans are providing care in Coney Island and the Rockaways and will start service on Staten Island today.
There were other pockets of incremental progress. Intercity bus operators BoltBus and Megabus, which offer low-cost fares to passengers between Washington, New York and Boston, have restored full service along the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor, spokesmen for both companies said Monday. Construction at the World Trade Center site, which was inundated along with much of Lower Manhattan during the storm, resumed Monday, Cuomo announced.
But looming over the recovery is the prospect that some of it might be derailed. A nor’easter taking shape Monday in the Gulf of Mexico was expected to begin its march up the coast, eventually passing within 50 to 100 miles of the wounded New Jersey coastline Wednesday. The storm was expected to carry winds of up to 55 mph, coastal flooding, up to 2 inches of rain along the shore, and several inches of snow to Pennsylvania and New York.
One of the biggest fears was that the storm would again flood parts of the shore where Sandy wiped out natural beach defenses and protective dunes.
“It’s going to impact many areas that were devastated by Sandy,” said Bruce Terry, the lead forecaster for the National Weather Service. “It will not be good.”
Some communities were considering again evacuating neighborhoods that were hit hard by Sandy and where residents had only recently been allowed to return.
Coastal flood and high wind watches were in effect for parts of Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
FEMA said it has already dispensed close to $200 million in emergency housing assistance and has put 34,000 people in the New York and New Jersey metropolitan area up in hotels and motels.
Federal officials said more than 30,000 families had been approved for temporary rental assistance, totaling more than $95 million for apartments.
But local, state and federal officials have yet to lay out a specific, comprehensive plan for finding them long-term places to live, even as cold weather sets in. And given the scarcity and high cost of housing in the metropolitan area and the lack of open space, it could prove a monumental undertaking.
Bloomberg said Monday that more than half of the people who needed emergency housing were in public housing, and that most of that housing should have electricity this week.
He said a worst-case estimate for those who might need temporary housing was 40,000 people, with 20,000 in public housing; he said better numbers would emerge after a survey.
Many problems were being tackled, Bloomberg said, adding that “those who have much more serious needs, we are not going to walk away from you.”
Because so many voters have been displaced by the storm, Cuomo issued an executive order allowing people to vote in today’s elections at any polling place in the state.
“Just because you are displaced doesn’t mean you are disenfranchised,” Cuomo said. “Compared to what we have had to deal with in the past week, this will be a walk in the park when it comes to voting.”
In West Virginia, officials relocated a handful of polling precincts because of continuing power failures from Sandy.
School and shelter officials at Brooklyn Tech High School in New York are planning to shepherd the building’s more than 250 evacuees, many of whom are psychiatric patients, onto the top two floors of the school, including the cafeteria area, so that classes can resume in the bottom six floors. Students will eat boxed lunches in the auditorium, said Elizabeth Johnson, the school’s United Federation of Teachers chapter leader. The principal has asked for extra security for the school starting Wednesday, she said.
She remained skeptical that the transition would be smooth.
“It smells of garbage and human waste, and people have been sleeping in our classrooms,” Johnson said. “We understand these people need a place to go, but we’re also worried about students - when they come back, they need it to be safe and clean. People are doing the best they can, but it’s just overwhelming.”
The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported Monday that it is working with the state of New York and local food banks to distribute 1.1 million pounds of food to victims in New York City, Long Island, and Westchester and Rockland counties. USDA worked with New Jersey and local organizations last week to produce meals for victims in shelters there.
The department also has approved requests from Connecticut, Maryland, New York, Rhode Island and Virginia to automatically reimburse food stamp recipients in certain counties for food lost in the storm.
USDA issued a waiver in parts of New York to allow food stamp recipients to purchase hot foods with their benefits. The benefits cannot normally be used to purchase hot, ready-to-eat foods.
Information for this article was contributed by The New York Times, The Associated Press and Bloomberg News.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/06/2012