STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It's MORNING EDITION from NPR News. I'm Steve Inskeep.
RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:
And I'm Renee Montagne.
Last night, a nor'easter blew hard along the coast bringing new misery to those in New York and New Jersey, already without heat, power or, in some cases, a place to live.
We're joined now for more on that storm by NPR's Martin Kaste who's in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Good morning.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: Good morning.
MONTAGNE: Tell us where you are and what you're seeing, Martin.
KASTE: Well, I poked my head outside here - I'm on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, I'm standing near a little piece of it that didn't fare so well during Sandy. But it looks like this storm is now passing. It's still kind of cold and blustery, but the snow, the gusts of wind that we saw overnight, that seems to be dissipating. And basically, the real upshot of the storm, inland, was two or three inches of snow in some places, snow up in New York, Long Island - just kind of a cold, annoying storm - early winter storm.
MONTAGNE: So what might be a nice pleasant snow, is just added - piled on more misery to those who've been suffering this last week and a half. How were people able to prepare for this over the last 24 hours since it was predicted?
KASTE: Well, they really braced themselves, worried that it would be worse than usual, just because of the situation - everything is just so fragile here right now. The state lined up dump trucks full of sand and rebuilt - the best they could - some of the sand dunes on some of the islands on the coast of New Jersey. They asked people to evacuate to the low-lying areas. They were worried about tidal surge and some flooding there. That didn't turn out to be too big a danger. The real issue is the power restoration - these thousands of utility workers who are out trying to repair all the lines that were damaged during Sandy. So many people lost power then and they've done a lot of work getting that back up. And now, the real concern was that they would backslide a little bit. Yesterday, New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, said that if that was what happened, people would just have to deal with it.
GOVERNOR CHRIS CHRISTIE: And we'll just double back. We have 11,000 utility workers on the ground in New Jersey. We're housing them here. We're not letting them leave. They're staying. We're treating them real nice. And we'll make sure that they stay here and they get right back to work.
MONTAGNE: OK, so there's Governor Chris Christie. How long is this expected to last, this bad weather?
KASTE: It shouldn't last too much longer. There's - the forecast for the weekend is actually quite nice. They're talking about temperatures in the 60s. The governor said that would help re-accelerate some of the recovery efforts here. Even gave his word that, perhaps by the weekend, he would have some sort of a plan for the orderly repopulation, as he put it, of some of the closed areas, some of the closed neighborhoods on those islands.
MONTAGNE: Martin, thanks very much.
KASTE: You're welcome.
MONTAGNE: That's NPR's Martin Kaste, speaking to us from Atlantic City, New Jersey. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
