For a pre-winter storm with no name, the weekend nor’easter that blew through town packed quite a powerful punch, closing schools, clogging highways and leaving hundreds of thousands of residents without power or heat.
While most utility companies in the area said power would be restored by Thursday at the latest, lights and laptops might not return to life in some places for another week.
That was bad news for frustrated homeowners, already up to their elbows in shattered tree branches and broken promises.
Anger was high enough in some neighborhoods to spark talk of taking pages from the Wall Street movement and “occupying” a local utility company.
“We’ve been without power since Saturday,” said Yael Rabitz, a Public Service Electric & Gas customer in Teaneck, NJ, one of the Garden State’s harder hit communities.
“PSE&G at this point is not giving us any information. We have not seen one truck in our area. There seems to be a major lack of communication between PSE&G and the town. It’s like he said, she said. It’s a little frustrating.”
The rare October storm that smacked the East Coast unplugged more than 2 million homes from Maryland to Maine, including more than 750,000 in Connecticut, a state record.
Among those without power in the tri-state area was New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose Mendham, NJ, home went dark for 27 hours. There was also a blackout at the governor’s mansion in Princeton.
Christie said the fallout from the early winter blast was worse than the damage wrought by Hurricane Irene, which blew through over the summer.
“The biggest challenge here, and the thing that makes it more difficult than Irene, is the tree situation,” Christie said.
“This is really a power outage driven by the snow and the fact that the leaves are still in the trees. We have trees down all across the northern part of the state that have taken wires down.”
Only an inch of snow fell in Central Park, but it was wet and heavy enough to push leafy tree branches to the breaking point.
Dana Libner, spokeswoman for the Central Park Conservancy, which runs the park, said 1,000 trees could be lost to the storm.
Crews were working overtime to clear fallen branches and splintered trees from paths and roads in Central Park in time for this weekend’s New York City Marathon, the course of which winds through the park.
“The destruction is staggering,” the conservancy said in a donation appeal on its Web site.
The storm also wiped out Halloween plans in communities across the region, including Hartford, Conn., where officials said downed power lines and a maze of tree branches might be too scary — and dangerous — for kids.
Additional reporting by Laurel Babcock
A National Grid electric worker repairs power lines, two days after a rare and deadly October snowstorm lingered in the Northeast, leaving 2.2 million houses without power, closing schools, snarling the morning commute. (Reuters)