Gasoline rationing begins in New York City

NEW YORK – New York City started rationing gas Friday morning as tempers remained short, lines remained long and panic buying continued more than 10 days after a deadly superstorm stunned the infrastructure of America’s largest city.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said the shortages could last another couple of weeks and that only a quarter of the city’s gas stations were open. Some had no power, and others couldn’t get fuel from terminals.

“This is designed to let everybody have a fair chance,” Bloomberg said of the new system based on even-numbered and odd-numbered license plates.
 

Superstorm Sandy killed more than 100 people in several states, most of them in New York and New Jersey, and its damage has been estimated at up to $50 billion. That makes it the second most expensive storm in U.S. history, behind Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

In another reminder of Katrina, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced Thursday that it had started to move several hundred mobile homes into New York and New Jersey for the tens of thousands who have to leave their damaged homes as winter weather arrives.

FEMA was widely criticized for using trailers after Katrina devastated New Orleans when many were found to contain toxic levels of formaldehyde. FEMA says the mobile homes being brought to the New York area are different.
 

The Energy Department has said the superstorm also left more people in the dark than any other storm in U.S. history. At the peak, more than 8.5 million homes and businesses across 21 states lost power.

Hundreds of thousands of customers, mostly in New York and New Jersey, were still waiting Friday for their electricity to come back on. An angry New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo blasted the local utilities as unprepared and badly managed.

“It’s unacceptable the longer it goes on because the longer it goes on, people’s suffering is worse,” he said Thursday.

The utilities have said they are dealing with damage unprecedented in its scope.
 

A new, weaker storm on Wednesday dropped a layer of wet snow and knocked out power to more than 200,000 customers in New York and New Jersey, erasing some of the progress made by utility crews.

Early Friday, there were more than 288,000 outages in New York and about 265,000 in New Jersey.

 —

Contributing to this report were Associated Press writers Tom Hays, Frank Eltman, Kiley Armstrong, Jonathan Fahey, Colleen Long, David B. Caruso and Jennifer Peltz in New York; Mike Gormley in Albany, New York and Wayne Perry in Point Pleasant Beach, New Jersey.