As overnight temperatures fell to the 40s, power crews in more than a dozen states navigated a tangle of fallen trees, downed power lines and dangerous floodwaters in the painstaking, house-by-house work of reconnecting millions of customers left in the dark by Sandy.
Power was restored by late Thursday to about half of 10 million households and businesses that lost electricity during the storm, according to the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group that represents investor-owned utilities. But millions more remained cut off from power needed to operate furnaces, heaters, refrigerators and lights.
'It's freezing like an ice box,' said Lydia Crespo, who was using a gas stove to heat her home in Staten Island, N.Y., still without power. 'No hot water, no light. All you smell is the gas, the oil, the mold.'
The death toll attributed to Sandy reached 90, authorities said Thursday. Transit bottlenecks began to ease in New York City with the reopening of some subways, but in New Jersey and elsewhere lines stretched long from gas stations lucky enough to have both electricity and gasoline. Amtrak said it would resume southbound train service from Pennsylvania Station on Thursday evening, and limited service to Boston on Friday. But NJTransit trains remained largely out of service.
U.S. Air Force cargo planes were flying utility crews and 636 tons of equipment, including electric company bucket trucks, to speed power restoration.
Long-standing mutual-aid pacts, activated days before Sandy hit, drew an emergency team of more than 64,000 workers from 82 utility companies across the U.S., including a crew from San Diego Gas & Electric that arrived Thursday.
'It's epic,' said Brian Wolff, senior vice president of Edison Electric. 'I think it's the biggest mobilization we've seen.'
Their task is Herculean: 1.7 million customers were without electricity in New Jersey; 1.5 million in New York; 500,000 in Pennsylvania; 348,000 in Connecticut; 139,000 in West Virginia; 40,000 in Maryland; and 21,000 in Rhode Island.
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said neighborhoods served by overhead lines may not be repaired until the end of next week. 'We have volunteer crews from across the country,' Mr. Bloomberg said. 'But it's just an enormous job, and you have to go up in a bucket and fix each one as you get to it.'
Utility crews were slowed by downed trees blocking roads and homes with standing water that made them too dangerous to reconnect to the grid.
'We've got to go block by block, house by house,' said Ralph Izzo, chairman of Public Service Enterprise Group Inc., a New Jersey utility.
Workers at the utility, which serves a wide swath of the state, used toothbrushes to scrub the mud from flooded equipment at switching stations, he said, trying to get them working for 780,000 customers without power. Workers used rags to dry the gear by hand.