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N.Y. has subways again, but Irene leaves millions without electricity

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It wasn’t bad as it could have been, but Irene’s fierce winds and torrential rains over the weekend have left more than 20 people dead and 5 million people along the Eastern Seaboard without power. Many areas are still flooded and struggling with roads blocked by fallen trees and downed power lines.

New York’s massive public transportation system, closed for the first time for a natural disaster, resumed service just before the Monday morning rush hour. Most subway lines had trains rolling and buses were back on the city streets, according to city officials and local news reports.

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PHOTOS: In the path of the storm

‘I’m glad it came when it did,’ a New Yorker told a reporter from NY 1 as a train whizzed past her on a subway platform. ‘I didn’t expect it, I didn’t expect it at all.’

While trains from Long Island and the New Jersey were mostly back chugging to the city Monday morning, commuters from Westchester Countyand Connecticut weren’t so lucky. Metro-North which serves the northern suburbs was still shutdown. While all the major roads and tunnels ringing the city were open, traffic into Manhattan was expected to be anything but swift, according to news reports.

JFK and Newark were accepting arriving planes with departures expected to resume at noon and La Guardia was officially fully operative.

‘Normal’ and ‘near normal’ were the watchwords by television newscasters discussing public services in the New York area Monday morning. But the pictures told a different story--of tree limbs splayed across local roads in Queens and Brooklyn, of workers still ankle deep in water as they tried to clear broken furniture out of a Long Island restaurant, and of a lone yellow cab still up to its windows in water.

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---Geraldine Baum

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