More:

Cuomo Fires Emergency Office Chief for Misusing Workers in Hurricane
By Danny Hakim, New York Times, November 7/8, 2012

ALBANY — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has dismissed his chief of emergency management after learning that he deployed government workers to clear a tree at his Long Island home during Hurricane Sandy, an administration official said Wednesday.

The aide, Steven Kuhr, was the director of the State Office of Emergency Management. The office coordinates the state response to disasters and is New York’s counterpart to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Mr. Kuhr was appointed little more than a year ago; he had run an emergency management consulting firm called the Strategic Emergency Group. Before that, he spent two decades working for New York City in a variety of jobs [....]

During the storm, Mr. Kuhr, who lives in Suffolk County, was working in Albany. At a time when work crews were in high demand, he is believed to have told the Suffolk County Office of Emergency Management to clear a tree from his driveway, an administration official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the dismissal had not yet been made public.

Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, recently found out what had happened and dismissed Mr. Kuhr, [....]

Mr. Cuomo has expressed increasing frustration that so many New Yorkers are still without power — about 240,000, according to the latest report from the federal Energy Department — and has repeatedly threatened the public utilities that have been scrambling to restore service, even warning that they could lose their operating certificates.

The numbers are down from the more than two million New Yorkers who were without power immediately after the storm, but that has been little comfort to people, many of them on Long Island and in Westchester County, who are still in the dark as temperatures drop, the governor has acknowledged.

“Power continues to be a struggle,” Mr. Cuomo said Tuesday. “Until every family has their power back, we’re going to continue to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to make that happen.” [....]

The firing is particularly unusual because it comes in the middle of the crisis, when parts of the state are still reeling from hurricane damage and some communities are experiencing further damage from a northeaster that arrived in the region on Wednesday.

Mr. Kuhr, however, was not the senior aide leading the recovery efforts. That role is being filled by Howard Glaser, the state’s operations director and one of Mr. Cuomo’s most trusted aides, who has frequently appeared by his side in news conferences.[....]

By Wednesday afternoon, the winds had caused more than 100,000 new power outages in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, the U.S. Energy Department stated. That brought the total number to 715,000, most of those remaining from Superstorm Sandy, which made landfall in New Jersey on Oct. 29.

From

Nor'easter snow layers Sandy destruction; more evacuations, more power outages
By Miguel Llanos, NBC News, Updated at 11:21 p.m. ET

I am sure from seeing what this storm did here in the Bronx after it got dark that there are a ton more outages than what happened by the afternoon!

The snow is about as wet and heavy as I have ever seen snow get, the kind that sticks to wires and branches and piles up high on them and doesn't let go, and I'm originally from Wisconsin. And many inches came down in a remarkably short time. And the winds got worse, gusting more, after the heavy snow had piled up on everything.

FEMA only starting set up in some areas now:

FEMA teams set up operations across LI

Newsday-3 hours ago

Nine days after Sandy hit, FEMA is up and running in Islip -- almost. ... FEMA disaster-recovery teams are charged with providing homeowners ...

Caption: Dix Hills, Long Island, was covered in snow after Wednesday’s northeaster.

Credit: Barton Silverman/The New York Times

Source: Storm Aftermath: Continuing Coverage By The New York Times

Brooklyn doctor and family do heroic job in Coney hell  
They've embedded themselves with freezing seniors

By Simone Weichselbaum, New York Daily News, November 7, 2012:

24 stories with 6,000  residents with no elevator, no electricty, no heat, no water; excerpt:

[....] Dr. Victoria Katz, who runs the N.Y. Arthritis Clinic on E. 14th St. in Midwood, set up a satellite office inside the Warbasse Houses, a sprawling, mixed-income housing development on Neptune Ave. with a population of about 6,000 who are stuck in the cold.

“I feel so sorry. So many people don’t know what is happening,” said Victoria Katz said. “People don’t understand why they have to live like this.”

The Katz children — 30-year-old Jacob, who is a fourth-year medical student at the American University of Antigua, and 34-year-old Iya, who is a first-year medical student at the New York College of Osteopathic Medicine — rotate shifts climbing up and down 24-story buildings checking on residents.

The trio has treated more than a hundred people since Sandy hit last Monday.

“Although there are a lot of people we’ve helped, a lot more people need help,” said Jacob Katz, who volunteered himself and his family last week after learning about Warbasse’s woes from a Facebook post detailing how the five-building complex with 2,580 apartments had no electricity, working elevators, heat or hot water.

Sandy's winds pushed the Atlantic Ocean’s waters a half-mile north, flooding Warbasse’s basement electrical systems, which need to be rebuilt.

“Once the transformers got hit with salt water, they were done,” said Warbasse’s manger, Thomas Auletti [....]

No visiting The Lady and Ellis Island for the foreseeable future due to damage:

Storm Leaves Lady Liberty and Ellis Island Cut Off From Visitors
By Patrick McGeehan, New York Times, November 8, 2012

Hurricane Sandy did no real harm to the Statue of Liberty but caused “significant damage” to the infrastructure of Liberty Island and Ellis Island, which will leave them closed to tourists indefinitely, a spokesman for the National Park Service said on Thursday.

Most notably, the dock at Liberty Island that receives the large ferries filled with tourists arriving from Battery Park in Manhattan and Liberty State Park in New Jersey may need to be rebuilt. Statue Cruises, the company that operates the ferries, said it had stopped selling tickets to visit the islands and did not know when its service would resume.

The storm hit just a day after the interior of the statue was reopened after a yearlong renovation. On Oct. 28, Ken Salazar, the secretary of the interior, visited the statue as the storm was roaring up the East Coast. The Park Service had hoped to allow tourists into the statue again by Nov. 1, but the damage to the islands was much more severe than expected.

Mike Litterst, a spokesman for the “incident management team” that the Park Service has assembled in New York City, said the statue, its pedestal and its base received “little or no damage.” But, he added, none of the mechanical systems, including electricity, on Liberty Island were functioning after the basement of the building that houses a cafe and gift shop flooded.

The basement of the museum building on Ellis Island filled with several feet or water, which ruined mechanical equipment but did not harm any of the museum’s archives or artifacts, Mr. Litterst said.

The security screening apparatus housed in a large tent on the Battery Park waterfront was also “significantly damaged,” he said. A water line on the side of the tent indicated the tide had risen to about the level of the conveyor belts on the magnetometers inside the tent.

Tourists with tickets to visit the statue and Ellis Island have been showing up there only to be disappointed to find that the islands are closed off [....]

I'd really be surprised if the National Park Service drags their feet on repairs because of budget problems or anything else, I'm under the impression from past reading that these attractions more than pay for themselves, and that's talking monetary income, not intangibles.

Where Hurricane Sandy Still Hurts (Public housing without electricity, heat and water)
New York Times Editorial, November 8/9, 2012

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration estimated that Sandy had initially left more than 800,000 city customers without power, including many people in public housing. Many have since had their power and heat restored. Yet Steven Banks of the Legal Aid Society estimated on Thursday that more than 15,000 units of public housing closest to the city’s shoreline — mostly in the Rockaways, Coney Island and Red Hook — were still without heat and hot water or electricity.

“We’re into the second week of this,” he said, “and there is no real urgency to get it fixed. ...No can-do New York attitude here.”

More than 400 buildings run by the New York City Housing Authority were affected by the storm. Mr. Bloomberg said Thursday that 70 percent of these buildings now have heat and hot water and 82 percent have electricity. But that leaves 120 buildings and the people who live in them without heat or hot water and 72 buildings and their residents without electricity.

Whatever the precise numbers, by any accounting, life for these people is grim. On Wednesday afternoon, in the Far Rockaways, hundreds lined up for as much as three hours in the cold to get hot food promised by a makeshift delegation of volunteers. The multiple government agencies promising help were nowhere to be seen.

In a public housing building in Red Hook, residents received official notices warning that “Since Hurricane Sandy, the electricity and water will be out indefinitely.” Meanwhile, Mr. Bloomberg has been urging older residents and other vulnerable citizens to “go someplace warm,” like shelters.

On Thursday, Mr. Bloomberg expressed the hope that private contractors would be able to restore electricity by the weekend and heat “sometime early next week” to affected buildings. This is hardly comforting news to people huddled in blankets as temperatures drop. There seems to be no clear answer for why it has taken so long to send out temporary generators and boilers to help these residents.

City Hall leaders argue that restoring power is a process that is more complicated than simply bringing in generators, especially in buildings where electrical systems have been badly compromised. They promise to dispatch additional workers to public housing and a phased-in schedule to bring more power and heat each day to devastated areas like the Rockaways. To us, that sounds late and insufficient. Mr. Bloomberg needs to redouble his efforts to help those most in need.

I listened to part of Bloomberg's press conference today and it seems very much that he was responding to it, making excuses, saying what he was doing now, i.e., the Times yelling at him on behalf of those without much power really works.