DisastersNor'easter batters NYC, New Jersey

A nor’easter battered New York and New Jersey on Wednesday with rain and wet snow, plunging homes back into darkness, stopping commuter trains, and inflicting yet more misery on thousands of people still trying to recover from Superstorm Sandy.

Ordinarily, the nor’easter would not pose major problems, but this was not the case yesterday, as the storm hit an area where electrical systems were still fragile and many of Sandy’s victims still busy cleaning their homes and coping with deepening cold.

The nor’easter brought down more tree limbs and electrical wires, causing nearly 50,000 customers who lost power because of Sandy to lose it again.

As the storm closed in, the NYC authorities urged thousands in low-lying areas to clear out. Emergency managers were especially worried  that the 60 mph gusts would topple trees wrenched loose by Sandy.

“I am waiting for the locusts and pestilence next,” New Jersey governor Chris Christie said. “We may take a setback in the next 24 hours.”

In anticipation of the storm, public works crews in New Jersey built up dunes to protect the stripped and battered coast, and new evacuations were ordered in a number of communities already emptied by Sandy.

Major developments:

• New shelters opened.
• In New York City, police went to low-lying neighborhoods with loudspeakers, urging residents to leave. Mayor Michael Bloomberg did not issue mandatory evacuations, and many people stayed behind.
• All construction in New York City was halted.
• Manhattan. Parks were closed because of the danger of falling trees. A section of the Long Island Expressway was closed in both directions because of icy conditions.
• Airlines canceled at least 1,300 U.S. flights in and out of the New York metropolitan area, causing a new round of disruptions that rippled across the country.
• The city manager in Long Beach, New York, urged the roughly 21,000 people who ignored previous mandatory evacuation orders in the badly damaged barrier-island city to get out.
• Forecasters said the nor’easter would bring moderate coastal flooding, with storm surges of about 3 feet possible Wednesday into Thursday — far less than the 8 to 14 feet Sandy hurled at the region.
• The storm’s winds were expected to be well below Sandy’s, which gusted to 90 mph.
• By Wednesday evening, the storm had created a slushy mess in the streets in the metropolitan area. Eight-foot waves crashed on the beaches in New Jersey.
• The Long Island Rail Road, one of the nation’s biggest commuter train systems, suspended all service again after struggling over the past several days to get up and running in Sandy’s wake.
• Con Ed said that by early evening, the nor’easter knocked out power to at least 11,000 customers, some of whom had just gotten it back. Tens of thousands more were expected to lose power overnight.
• The Long Island Power Authority said by evening that the number of customers in the dark had risen from 150,000 to more than 198,000.
• New Jersey utilities reported scattered outages, with some customers complaining that they had just gotten their electricity back in the past two day or two, only to lose it again.
• On Staten Island, workers and residents on a washed-out block in Midland Beach continued to pull debris — old lawn chairs, stuffed animals, a basketball hoop — from their homes, even as the bad weather blew in.
• Sandy killed more than 100 people in 10 states, with most of the victims in New York and New Jersey.
• Long lines persisted at gas stations but were shorter than they were days ago.
• At the peak of the outages from Sandy, more than 8.5 million customers lost power. Before the nor’easter hit, that number was down to 675,000, nearly all of them in New Jersey and New York.
• The storm could bring repairs to a standstill because of federal safety regulations that prohibit linemen from working in bucket trucks when wind gusts reach 40 mph.
• Authorities warned also that trees and limbs broken or weakened by Sandy could fall and that even where repairs have been made, the electrical system is fragile, with some substations fed by only a single power line instead of several.
• The nor’easter cut a feed to a substation briefly Wednesday night, knocking out power to 8,000 customers around East Brunswick, New Jersey.
• On Wednesday, New York governor Andrew Cuomo fired his emergency management director for diverting crews to remove a tree from his driveway during Superstorm Sandy.