Adrees Latif/Reuters
Breezy Point, Queens, was still a scene of devastation on Monday, as some people had begun to lose hope that help was coming.
In Coney Island, a 67-year-old man sleeps with plastic bottles from the bodega, filled with hot water, tucked in his armpits. Toilets unflushed by modern means for a fortnight have created a stench in the Rockaways that is so bad that one man keeps incense burning in his apartment day and night.
On Staten Island, people sit in "warming buses," cozy and, like time itself these days, going nowhere. In a town in New Jersey where wells do not pump because the power is out, residents collect rainwater in empty jars. In Long Beach, on Long Island, a couple bicycles through the autumn chill to the charging station at City Hall to keep their cellphones powered.
Two weeks. Monday was the 14th day since Hurricane Sandy upended lives on the Eastern Seaboard, the longest two weeks of many people's lives. Plastic bottles. Warming buses. Charging stations. These are just a few of the signposts in a changed world. Help is coming, the people are told, but some have lost the desire to trust.
"I don't believe," said Lioudmila Korableva, 71, a resident of a darkened Coney Island building project filled with older people.
"In the wall goes water," she said, describing the humid conditions with her Russian accent. There is just too much moisture in the air. "The blanket is wet."
Power companies in New York and New Jersey worked on Monday to free these remaining communities from the stubborn blackout. There was progress, with housing projects in Coney Island and the Rockaways flickering to life on Saturday and Sunday. There was light, if not heat. Families that had warmed their apartments with stovetop burners could now use the electric oven, with its door wide open. A woman used the burner for its intended purpose on Monday morning, handing her granddaughter a pancake on a paper plate.
New Jersey announced an end to gas rationing. Long Island Rail Road service returned to nearly prestorm timetables. Progress was everywhere, it seemed, but for the man getting his news from a radio with batteries, not here.
"I talk to God," said Mark Kremer, the Coney Island man whose bedtime routine includes the hot water bottles. "What I did, to suffer like this?"
A former home health attendant, he climbs from his second-floor apartment up the pitch black stairs to the 12th floor, to check on his friend Asya Kaplan, 82, who fell in the hall a few days ago and opened up a gash at her hairline.
In the Ocean Village Apartments at the Shore in the Rockaways, there now exists a dividing line at the 10th floor. Below, there is running water. Above, none. A resident on the 14th floor, Lola Idowu, straps on her miner's helmet with its flashlight and treks down to 10 for buckets of water, four times a day. The older residents have stopped flushing their toilets, neighbors said, and they gather in the lobby, bringing their apartments' odors with them.
Only small children have accepted this new life in the Rockaways without complaint. Very small: Jayleb, a boy now one month old, has lived half his life this way. He sleeps in a duffel coat, inside a baby blanket that is under two quilts. "To even change his Pampers is an ordeal," his mother, Tonya Ranero, 35, said.
In Long Beach on Long Island, a mother, Evelyn Hogarth, 32, frightened by the conditions in a shelter, returned home with her three children and ailing mother. "There are roaches everywhere," she said. "I don't know what to do."
Nearby, Michael Hardy and Denaya Hardy, both 38, celebrated their 16th wedding anniversary in the dark, between trips to the basement to fill a bucket with floodwater, to flush the toilets.
"We celebrated by eating rations and drinking water," Mr. Hardy said.
Elsewhere in Long Beach, as he spoke, the National Guard handed out water at a shopping center. People brought dead cellphones to a charging station at City Hall, near the portable toilets. In the Silverton section of Toms River, N.J., the surge and the wind knocked out the 10-foot windows from Wayne Whitall's home. His pool table had become a floating battering ram, knocking through a wall and landing in a yard. The boat was across the street, where he was trying to free it from debris on Monday.
In Seaside Heights after two weeks, a first: residents were allowed to visit stricken parts of the town for a few hours on Monday morning.
Reporting was contributed by Ruth Bashinsky, Russ Buettner, Stephen Farrell, David M. Halbfinger and Sarah Maslin Nir.
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