NEW YORK The cleanup of miles of New Jersey shorefront ripped apart by Superstorm Sandy has just begun, but New York City moved closer to resuming its normal frenetic pace Thursday by getting back its vital subways.
The storm-crippled trains began rolling uptown from Penn Station shortly after 6 a.m. Technology worker Ronnie Abraham was on one of them, hoping to get home to Harlem.
10 Photos
[h=3]Before-and-after views of Sandy destruction[/h]
42 Photos
[h=3]Superstorm's most dramatic images[/h]
"It's the lifeline of the city," Abraham said as he boarded. "It can't get much better than this."
New Yorkers began lining up at subway stops by 5 a.m. Thursday, an hour before the subways were to resume limited service. The predawn commuters waiting at platforms included construction workers, shop owners and executives.
The decision to reopen undamaged parts of the nation's largest transit system came as the region struggled to find its way back from a storm that killed more than 70 people and left more than 5 million without power.
Two of the region's main airports opened Wednesday and officials promised that the third, LaGuardia Airport, would return to service Thursday. Actors and eager audiences brought darkened Broadway theaters back to life. And New Yorkers packed on to buses that returned for the first time to city streets since the storm, joining a throng of gridlocked traffic that navigated the city without working stop lights.
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 cellphones to those without power.
The spirit of can-do partnership extended even to politicians, who at least made the appearance of putting their differences aside to focus together on Sandy.
Play Video
[h=3]Obama, Christie on Hurricane Sandy recovery: We will not quit[/h]
Play Video
[h=3]Romney on Hurricane Sandy: "We are going through trauma"[/h]
"We are here for you," President Obama said in Brigantine, N.J., touring a ravaged shore. "We are not going to tolerate red tape. We are not going to tolerate bureaucracy."
Mr. Obama joined Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who had been one of the most vocal supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, to tour the ravaged coast. But the two men spoke only of helping those harmed by the storm.
That was already beginning Wednesday, when masses of people walked shoulder-to-shoulder across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan for work, reversing the escape scenes from the Sept. 11 terror attack and the blackout of 2003. They reached an island, where many people took the lack of power and water and transportation as a personal challenge.
On Third Avenue, people gathered like refugees around a campfire. But instead of crackling flames, their warmth came from more advanced technology: a power strip that had been offered to charge cellphones.
At a fire hydrant on West 16th Street, 9-year-old Shiyin Ge and her brother, 12-year-old Shiyuan Ge, stood in line to fill up buckets of water. But unlike the adults, the two kids held plastic Halloween candy pails painted with grinning jack-o-lanterns.
"There's no water in our house," said Shiyin Ge, who had planned to dress up as a ladybug for Halloween.
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.
Play Video
[h=3]111 homes burned in Breezy Point disaster[/h]
Play Video
[h=3]NYC transit system coming back - slowly[/h]
To get there from Brooklyn or Queens, commuters who would normally zoom beneath the East River in tunnels that flooded will have to take shuttle buses, adding to the enormous stress already being placed on gridlocked Manhattan streets.
"We are going to need some patience and tolerance," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday.
The biggest challenge remains pumping floodwaters out of tunnels, and the U.S. military is helping.
"We're bringing pumps in now," Lt. Gen. Thomas Bostick, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, told "CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley. "They pump out about 28,000 gallons per minute. To put that in understandable terms, it'll empty a pool, an Olympic-size pool, in about 20 minutes. We're trying to figure out how many pools we have in New York City."
The airports and subways weren't the only transportation systems returning to the region. Suburban trains started running for the first time on Wednesday, and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor was to take commuters from city to city for on Friday for the first time since the storm.
From West Virginia to the Jersey Shore, the storm's damage was still being felt, and seen.
Play Video
[h=3]Surveying the damage along New Jersey's coast[/h]
In New Jersey, signs of the good life that had defined wealthy shorefront enclaves like Bayhead and Mantoloking 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 entirely disappeared.
"This," said Harry Typaldos, who owns the Grenville Inn in Mantoloking, "I just can't comprehend."
Bob Davis, who rode out the storm in his home on Long Beach Island, told CBS News correspondent Chip Reid that in 40 years on the island he's never seen a storm with anything like this kind of power.
"We made it through, and it's just the cleanup now," said Davis. "But it's going to take, in my estimation, it's about two years to get the island back in shape."
Most of the state's mass transit systems remained shut down, leaving hundreds of thousands of commuters braving clogged highways and quarter-mile lines at gas stations. Atlantic City's casinos remained closed. Christie postponed Halloween until Monday, saying trick-or-treating wasn't safe in towns with flooded and darkened streets, fallen trees and downed power lines.
Farther north in Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, nearly 20,000 residents remained stranded in their homes, amid accusations that officials have been slow to deliver food and water. One man blew up an air mattress and floated to City Hall, demanding to know why supplies hadn't gotten out. At least one-fourth of the city's residents are flooded and 90 percent are without power.
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The storm-crippled trains began rolling uptown from Penn Station shortly after 6 a.m. Technology worker Ronnie Abraham was on one of them, hoping to get home to Harlem.
[h=3]Before-and-after views of Sandy destruction[/h]
[h=3]Superstorm's most dramatic images[/h]
"It's the lifeline of the city," Abraham said as he boarded. "It can't get much better than this."
New Yorkers began lining up at subway stops by 5 a.m. Thursday, an hour before the subways were to resume limited service. The predawn commuters waiting at platforms included construction workers, shop owners and executives.
The decision to reopen undamaged parts of the nation's largest transit system came as the region struggled to find its way back from a storm that killed more than 70 people and left more than 5 million without power.
Two of the region's main airports opened Wednesday and officials promised that the third, LaGuardia Airport, would return to service Thursday. Actors and eager audiences brought darkened Broadway theaters back to life. And New Yorkers packed on to buses that returned for the first time to city streets since the storm, joining a throng of gridlocked traffic that navigated the city without working stop lights.
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 cellphones to those without power.
The spirit of can-do partnership extended even to politicians, who at least made the appearance of putting their differences aside to focus together on Sandy.
[h=3]Obama, Christie on Hurricane Sandy recovery: We will not quit[/h]
[h=3]Romney on Hurricane Sandy: "We are going through trauma"[/h]
"We are here for you," President Obama said in Brigantine, N.J., touring a ravaged shore. "We are not going to tolerate red tape. We are not going to tolerate bureaucracy."
Mr. Obama joined Republican Gov. Chris Christie, who had been one of the most vocal supporters of Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, to tour the ravaged coast. But the two men spoke only of helping those harmed by the storm.
That was already beginning Wednesday, when masses of people walked shoulder-to-shoulder across the Brooklyn Bridge to Manhattan for work, reversing the escape scenes from the Sept. 11 terror attack and the blackout of 2003. They reached an island, where many people took the lack of power and water and transportation as a personal challenge.
On Third Avenue, people gathered like refugees around a campfire. But instead of crackling flames, their warmth came from more advanced technology: a power strip that had been offered to charge cellphones.
At a fire hydrant on West 16th Street, 9-year-old Shiyin Ge and her brother, 12-year-old Shiyuan Ge, stood in line to fill up buckets of water. But unlike the adults, the two kids held plastic Halloween candy pails painted with grinning jack-o-lanterns.
"There's no water in our house," said Shiyin Ge, who had planned to dress up as a ladybug for Halloween.
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.
[h=3]111 homes burned in Breezy Point disaster[/h]
[h=3]NYC transit system coming back - slowly[/h]
To get there from Brooklyn or Queens, commuters who would normally zoom beneath the East River in tunnels that flooded will have to take shuttle buses, adding to the enormous stress already being placed on gridlocked Manhattan streets.
"We are going to need some patience and tolerance," New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday.
The biggest challenge remains pumping floodwaters out of tunnels, and the U.S. military is helping.
"We're bringing pumps in now," Lt. Gen. Thomas Bostick, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, told "CBS Evening News" anchor Scott Pelley. "They pump out about 28,000 gallons per minute. To put that in understandable terms, it'll empty a pool, an Olympic-size pool, in about 20 minutes. We're trying to figure out how many pools we have in New York City."
The airports and subways weren't the only transportation systems returning to the region. Suburban trains started running for the first time on Wednesday, and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor was to take commuters from city to city for on Friday for the first time since the storm.
From West Virginia to the Jersey Shore, the storm's damage was still being felt, and seen.
[h=3]Surveying the damage along New Jersey's coast[/h]
In New Jersey, signs of the good life that had defined wealthy shorefront enclaves like Bayhead and Mantoloking 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 entirely disappeared.
"This," said Harry Typaldos, who owns the Grenville Inn in Mantoloking, "I just can't comprehend."
Bob Davis, who rode out the storm in his home on Long Beach Island, told CBS News correspondent Chip Reid that in 40 years on the island he's never seen a storm with anything like this kind of power.
"We made it through, and it's just the cleanup now," said Davis. "But it's going to take, in my estimation, it's about two years to get the island back in shape."
Most of the state's mass transit systems remained shut down, leaving hundreds of thousands of commuters braving clogged highways and quarter-mile lines at gas stations. Atlantic City's casinos remained closed. Christie postponed Halloween until Monday, saying trick-or-treating wasn't safe in towns with flooded and darkened streets, fallen trees and downed power lines.
Farther north in Hoboken, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, nearly 20,000 residents remained stranded in their homes, amid accusations that officials have been slow to deliver food and water. One man blew up an air mattress and floated to City Hall, demanding to know why supplies hadn't gotten out. At least one-fourth of the city's residents are flooded and 90 percent are without power.
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