Excerpt
In Lower Manhattan, students shivered in school buildings that had lights, but no heat; on Staten Island, they sat by classmates whose homes had been destroyed; and in every borough, some students stayed home as the city used their classrooms, hallways and gymnasiums as shelters.
All day Monday, the city scrambled to deal with a Rubik’s Cube of displacements, delayed openings, modified schedules and new plans for evacuees using school buildings in an attempt to return as many students to classrooms as soon as possible.
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 even Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who has emphasized repeatedly the importance of restoring order to schools, acknowledged on Monday that many of those shelters were not likely to clear out quickly. “For every two that come in, three leave,” said Jeff Pedersen, the facility manager of the shelter at Susan E. Wagner High School on Staten Island, describing the situation on Monday.
The day was supposed to be a major step toward restoring New York City to what it had been before Hurricane Sandy struck. After the longest unplanned vacation in recent memory, most of the city’s 1.1 million public school students attended school, many of them making their way around downed trees and through streets that only recently had their traffic lights turn back on.
Commuters on Monday discovered just how much the hurricane had transformed the transit system. Almost every subway line had at least partial service restored, and Amtrak and intercity buses had resumed weekday service. But long lines at bus stops and impossibly packed trains were the norm, particularly on Long Island and in New Jersey. The scene at the Port Authority Bus Terminal during the evening rush hour featured long, snaking lines and frustrated commuters.
Persistent gas shortages compounded the headaches, with long lines of cars still crawling slowly toward the pumps. Mr. Bloomberg said that the police had assigned an officer to every gas station that was open.
And there was more bad news from forecasters: Another bout of perilous weather was coming, a northeaster that was expected to send gusts of up to 60 miles an hour between the Delmarva Peninsula and Long Island by Wednesday afternoon, along with sleet, snow and rain to parts of the metropolitan region. It could also bring a moderate storm surge, which could further damage properties where protective dunes were flattened by Hurricane Sandy.
No comments:
Post a Comment