NEW YORK -- New York City moved closer to resuming its frenetic pace by getting back its vital subways Thursday, three days after a superstorm, but neighbouring New Jersey was stunned by coastal devastation and the news of thousands of people in one city still stranded by increasingly fetid flood waters.
The decision to reopen undamaged parts of the United States' largest transit system came as the death toll reached more than 70 in the U.S. and left more than 4.6 million homes and businesses without power. Hurricane Sandy earlier left another at least 69 people dead as it swept through the Caribbean.
In New York, people streamed into the city as service began to resume on commuter train and subway. The three major airports resumed at least limited service, and the New York Stock Exchange was open again. Amtrak's Northeast Corridor -- the busiest train line in the country -- was to take commuters along the heavily populated East Coast again starting Friday.
But hundreds of people lined up for buses, traffic jammed for miles (kilometres) and long gas lined formed.
And hundreds of thousands in New York City alone were still without power, especially in downtown Manhattan, which remained in the dark roughly south of the Empire State Building after floodwaters had knocked out power.
Concerns rose over the elderly and poor all but trapped on upper floors of housing complexes in the powerless area, who faced pitch-black hallways, elevators and dwindling food. New York's governor ordered deliveries of food and drinking water to help them. New York dipped to about 40 degrees (4.44 degrees Celsius) Wednesday night.
"Our problem is making sure they know that food is available," New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Thursday, as officials expressed concern about people having to haul water from fire hydrants up darkened flights of stairs.
"Manhattan is getting back to normal -- at least, the parts most people notice," Alex Koppelman wrote for The New Yorker website Thursday in a report on the poor still isolated downtown.
Rima Finzi-Strauss was fleeing her apartment and taking a bus to Washington.
"We had three guys sitting out in the lobby last night with candlelight, and very threatening folks were passing by in the pitch black," she said. "And everyone's leaving. That makes it worse."
In New Jersey, the once-pristine Atlantic coastline famous for the TV show "Jersey Shore" was shattered. President Barack Obama joined Gov. Chris Christie in a helicopter tour of the devastation Wednesday and told evacuees, "We are here for you. We are not going to tolerate red tape. We are not going to tolerate bureaucracy."
And warnings rose again about global warming and the prospect of more such severe weather to come.
"The next 50 to 100 years are going to be very different than what we've seen in the past 50 years," said S. Jeffress Williams, a scientist emeritus at the U.S. Geological Survey's Woods Hole Science Center in Massachusetts. The sea level is rising fast, and destructive storms are occurring more frequently, said Williams, who expects things to get even worse.
Across the Hudson River from New York City, the floodwaters were slowly receding in the city of Hoboken, where an estimated 20,000 people had remained in their homes. The National Guard was helping with evacuations, but residents were warned not to walk around in water that was tainted with sewage and chemicals from the heavily industrial region.
New Jersey residents across the state were urged to conserve water. At least 1.7 million customers remained without electricity there, and fights broke out as people waited in long lines for gas.
The superstorm's effects, though much weakened, continued Thursday. Snow drifts as high as 5 feet (1.5 metres) piled up in West Virginia, where the former hurricane merged with two winter weather systems as it went inland.
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 mobile phones to those without power.
Bloomberg also ordered residents to share cars. Television footage Thursday showed heavy traffic crawling into Manhattan as police turned away cars that carried fewer than three people -- a rule meant to ease the congestion that paralyzed the city earlier in the week.
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.
Commuters lined up at Penn Station to board uptown subway trains at 6 a.m. Technology worker Ronnie Abraham was on one of them, hoping to get home to Harlem, a trip that is 20 minutes by train and 2 1/2 hours by bus.
"It's the lifeline of the city," Abraham said.
But most of New Jersey's mass transit systems remained shut, leaving hundreds of thousands of commuters stuck on clogged highways and in long lines at gas stations. Atlantic City's casinos remained closed.
Signs of the good life that had defined wealthy New Jersey shorefront enclaves 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 disappeared.
"This," said Harry Typaldos, who owns the Grenville Inn in Mantoloking, "I just can't comprehend."
