* 30,000 to 40,000 will need shelter, New York mayor says
* Death toll reaches 113 as temperatures dip near freezing
* Fuel and power still short; concern over Tuesday election
* Disappointed marathoners regroup, organize benefit runs
By Atossa Araxia Abrahamian and Edith Honan
NEW YORK, Nov 4 (Reuters) – A housing crisis loomed in New
York City as victims of superstorm Sandy struggled without heat
in near-freezing temperatures on Sunday and nearly 1 million
people in neighboring New Jersey shivered in the dark without
power.
Fuel shortages and power outages lingered nearly a week
after one of the worst storms in U.S. history flooded homes in
coastal neighborhoods. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said 30,000 to
40,000 people in New York City alone would need shelter.
“We don’t have a lot of empty housing in this city. It’s a
problem to find housing. We’re not going to let anybody go
sleeping in the street,” Bloomberg said. “But it’s a challenge
and we’re working on this as fast as we can.”
Temperatures were forecast to fall close to freezing
overnight and an early-season “Nor’easter” storm was expected to
hit the battered region this week with strong winds and heavy
rain.
“The power is back, but we have no heat,” said Adeline
Camacho, a volunteer who was giving soup and sandwiches to needy
residents of the Lower East Side of Manhattan on Sunday. “A lot
of people haven’t been able to bathe or stay warm. Last night
was cold and this night is going to be much worse.”
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said
federal agencies are looking for apartments and hotel rooms for
people displaced by Sandy. “Housing is really the number one
concern,” Napolitano said at a news conference with New Jersey
Governor Chris Christie.
Overnight, at least two more bodies were found in New Jersey
– one dead of hypothermia – as the overall North American death
toll from Sandy climbed to at least 113.
“People are in homes that are uninhabitable,” New York
Governor Andrew Cuomo said at a news conference.
Concerns are also growing that voters displaced by Sandy
won’t get to polling stations on Election Day on Tuesday. Scores
of voting centers were rendered useless by the record surge of
seawater in New York and New Jersey.
STRUGGLING IN STATEN ISLAND
Sandy killed 69 people in the Caribbean before turning north
and hammering the U.S. Eastern Seaboard on Monday with 80
mile-per-hour (130-kph) winds.
The two new deaths in New Jersey – where the storm came
ashore last Monday night – included a 71-year-old man who
suffered from hypothermia and a 55-year-old man who died from
smoke inhalation in a house fire, police said on Sunday.
That raised New Jersey’s death toll to 24 while the New York
City death count was 40.
In the hard-hit borough of Staten Island, Marie Mandia’s
house had a yellow sticker on it, meaning the city restricted
its use. The storm surge broke through her windows and flooded
her basement and main floor, the retired teacher said.
“I’m not staying here. There’s no protection,” said Mandia,
60, who stood outside by a pile of her ruined things – a washer,
drier, television and furniture. “Here’s my life. Everybody’s
looking at it.”
Similar scenes of destruction were to be seen in the
Rockaways, a strip of land along the Atlantic in Queens. Street
after street, people were digging out from under several feet of
sand and cleaning up from the deluge of water that ripped apart
fences, turned over cars and left homes flooded.
Volunteers made their way there to help, even as life
appeared to be back to normal in Times Square, where the neon
lights were bright and Broadway theaters were up and running.
“It’s like the city, the officials, have forgotten us. Only
our neighbors and strangers, volunteers, have been here,”
Gregory Piechocki said. “We don’t need food or water. We need a
warm place to sleep and some sign that we aren’t forgotten.”
The Federal Emergency Management Agency said 182,000
individuals in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey had
registered for assistance by Sunday afternoon, and more than
$158 million had been approved.
Sunday was to have been marathon day in New York, an
occasion that normally draws more than 40,000 runners from
around the world. But Bloomberg abruptly called off the race on
Friday, bowing to criticism that it would divert resources from
flood-ravaged neighborhoods.
Without a race, hundreds of runners set off on informal runs
to deliver food and clothes to people in need. More than 1,000
people crowded onto two Staten Island Ferry boats early on
Sunday, headed to the stricken borough with relief supplies.
Ruth Silverberg, 59, recently took a cruise in the Bahamas.
She returned to her Staten Island home Sunday for the first time
since the storm and found more than 4 feet (1.2 meters) of water
in her basement. “Things were just floating. I thought it would
take me two weeks to clear it out,” she said.
Instead, a group of 15 marathon runners formed an assembly
line and cleared the basement of its contents in two hours. “I’m
awed,” Silverberg said, her voice breaking.
FUEL AND POWER CRISIS
Fuel supplies continued to rumble toward disaster zones and
electricity was slowly returning to darkened neighborhoods where
many families have been without power for six days.
In New Jersey, where residents were waiting for hours in
line at gas stations, Christie tried to ease the fuel crunch by
reassuring people that refineries and pipelines were back online
and gas was being delivered. “We do not have a fuel shortage,”
he said at a news conference.
The New York Harbor energy network was returning to normal
on Sunday with mainline power restored, but there were growing
concerns about heating oil supplies with cold weather forecast.
Power restorations over the weekend relit the skyline in
Lower Manhattan for the first time in nearly a week and allowed
80 percent of the New York City subway service to resume. But
Bloomberg said it would be a “very, very long time” before power
would return to certain New York neighborhoods along the coast.
Most schools were due to reopen on Monday, though some were
still being used as shelters. Walt Whitman High School in
Huntington Station, Long Island, was housing about 100 people
and expecting more to arrive as temperatures fall.
Some 1.9 million homes and business still lacked power
across the Northeast on Sunday, down from 2.5 million the day
before.
“All these numbers are nice, but they mean nothing until the
power is on in your house,” Cuomo said.
One of those still without power was 70-year-old Ramon
Rodriguez, who lives in the Brooklyn seafront neighborhood of
Red Hook. “I feel like I’ve spent my whole Social Security check
on batteries and candles,” Rodriguez said as he waited in line
at the 99 Cent Dreams store. His search for ice to keep his
freezer cold came up short. But, he added, “at least it’s cold
enough to leave food outside the windowsill.”
At the building where he lives, garbage bags were piled high
and the intercom that is typically used for security was not
working, so the front door was unlocked.
ELECTION FACES ‘REAL PROBLEMS’
President Barack Obama, neck-and-neck in opinion polls with
Republican challenger Mitt Romney, ordered emergency response
officials to cut through government “red tape” and work without
delay to help affected areas return to normal.
With the post-storm chaos overshadowing the final days of
campaigning, an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found that 68
percent of those surveyed approved of how Obama handled Sandy,
while 15 percent disapproved.
New Jersey has said it will allow people displaced by the
storm to vote by email. In New York City, some 143,000 voters
will be reassigned to different polling sites.
Bloomberg said the Board of Elections has “real problems,”
and warned that it would be critical to make sure poll workers
were informed of the changes.
“Unfortunately, there is a history of not communicating
changes to their poll workers,” Bloomberg said, adding the board
has proven to be “dysfunctional” in recent years.
