A $12 million television ad campaign paid for by Mayors Against Illegal Guns hopes to push gun control efforts including comprehensive background checks.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the group's co-chair, announced the ad buy Saturday. The New York Times reported Bloomberg is financing the campaign.

“I don’t think there’s ever been an issue where the public has spoken so clearly, where Congress hasn’t eventually understood and done the right thing," Bloomberg told NBC News' David Gregory in an interview that will be broadcast Sunday on “Meet the Press.”

The ads will target both Democratic and Republican senators in key states.

One of the ads portrays a middle-aged man sitting on the back of a pick-up truck and holding a rifle.

"I've owned a gun all my life and I'll fight for my right to keep it," the man says. "Background checks have nothing to do with taking guns away from anyone," he adds.

The ad urges viewers to tell Congress to vote in support of comprehensive background checks. There is no mention in the ad of an assault weapons ban, but Bloomberg told Gregory he still hopes Congress could pass one.

“We’ve been fighting since 2007 to get a vote. We are going to have a vote on – for sure – on assault weapons and we’re going to have a vote on background checks," he said.

"And if we were to get background checks only it wouldn’t be as good as if we got both, but we demanded a plan and then we demanded a vote. We’ve got the plan, we’re going to get the vote.”

Mark Lennihan / AP

The Staten Island Pipes and Drum band marches in the Queens County St. Patrick's Day Parade in the Rockaway section of New York on Saturday. The oceanside community was devastated by flooding and fire during Superstorm Sandy. Behind them is rubble left over from a fire that burned a number of stores in Rockaway Park.

Hundreds marched Saturday through an area that was hit hard by Hurricane Sandy in the annual Queens County St. Patrick's Day Parade, but joy mixed with sorrow as evidence of the destruction persists four months after the storm hit.

The parade passed through several blocks in the Belle Harbor area, where fires triggered by the storm burned dozens of houses to the ground, NBC New York reported. Marchers also passed a block of burned stores in Rockaway Park.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg joined the parade, wearing a sash that said “Thanks” in Gaelic, according to The New York Times.

The Rockaway peninsula of Queens includes several predominantly Irish-American neighborhoods that were devastated when Sandy hit on Oct. 29.

“We go through problems, but human beings are able to cry and laugh at the same time,” Bloomberg said, according to the newspaper. “We have to celebrate how far we’ve come and what the hope is for the future.”

Amid residents showing their Irish pride, some marchers also held signs with messages about the post-Sandy recovery. "DOS [Department of Sanitation] You Rocked Sandy," one read, according to DNAinfo.com, while another, critical of the administration, read: "Mr. Mayor Listen to Rockaway."

As the mayor marched along, some residents booed him in disapproval of his handling of the area's problems in Sandy's wake.

But a few blocks from the parade route, rebuilding efforts were in full swing, as workers continued repairs on storm-damaged homes.

Mark Lennihan / AP

Families watch the Queens County St. Patrick's Day Parade in the Rockaway section of New York on Saturday.

Mario Tama / Getty Images

NEW YORK, NY - FEBRUARY 06: New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (L) speaks at a City Hall press conference on federal funds for Superstorm Sandy on February 6, 2013 in New York City.

Published 4:12 p.m. ET: New York City will use the first round of Superstorm Sandy relief to help residents repair homes, rebuild local businesses and use competition to spur development of storm resilient technology, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Wednesday.

Bloomberg laid out how the city will use the nearly $1.8 billion in initial aid to recover from the historic storm that ravaged parts of the East Coast in late October. The primary focus, he said at a press conference, is to help city residence repair their damaged property.

“We said at the very beginning that that was our real priority, to get people back in their homes. And we just made enormous progress,” said Bloomberg.  

This initial wave of funding is just the first round of aid the city hopes to receive from the $50 billion Hurricane Sandy relief package passed by Congress last month. The first installment of the package will total $5.4 billion, with New York State receiving $1.7 billion, $1.8 billion going to New Jersey, and the rest being split among Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maryland.

The $720 million set aside for housing recovery has also been designated for making low-income homes and apartments more storm resistant for future inclement weather.  Investments will also be made in permanent emergency generators public housing.   

Likewise, $185 will be set aside for business recovery, including $100 million in grants to local businesses.  Businesses that accept the aid will be required to reinvest in their New York City presence.  

Building off “Race to the Top,” a popular Department of Education initiative to spur innovation in American classrooms, the businessman turned mayor announced a $5-million competition for the most innovative and cost-effective ideas to produce storm resilient technologies that can be replicated throughout the city.   

 “You can’t have a neighborhood, you can’t live, if there aren’t local stores to get you jobs and buy local goods,” said Bloomberg. “So we want to make sure they recover and make themselves less vulnerable going forward.”

The third area the aid will go towards is making New York's infrastructure more resilient. A $40 million “Critical Utility Infrastructure Resiliency Competition” was announced to encourage development in storm resiliency measures.  A $100 million “Neighborhood Game-Changer Investment Competition” was also unveiled to spur ideas for long-term investment throughout New York City.

Bloomberg said the first round of relief was allocated to “to meet the most urgent needs of communities that sandy hit the hardest.” 

“We’re talking about the first stage of a plan that will bring a lot of relief to New York City,” he added.

Bloomberg said he expects the projects he announced Wednesday to be underway by early May.

Related:

Irish athletes help Breezy Point rebuild

Preliminary FEMA flood zone maps add 35,000 NYC buildings to flood zones

Scott Olson / Getty Images

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, pictured at a flag-raising ceremony at the Chicago Police Academy in October, said this month that "we will not rest" until Chicago's growing homicide rate is reversed.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was crowing.

"The number of murders this year will be lower than any time in recorded city history," Bloomberg said Friday in a statement announcing that homicides in the city this year had fallen to 414 — the fewest since it started keeping such statistics in 1963.

About the same time Friday, Chicago police were trying to get the message out that their city hadn't actually recorded its 500th homicide this year, as was being reported. A few hours later, they had to backtrack and acknowledge that, yes, in fact, "the city has seen its 500th homicide for 2012."

That's right: There were more homicides this year in Chicago than in New York, a city with three times the population. That means Chicagoans were proportionally 3.7 times more likely to be homicide victims than New Yorkers were in 2012:

Overall, crime is down in Chicago in just about every category — except the most devastating one.

"We've obviously seen, as a city, our shootings and our homicides going in a different direction," Mayor Rahm Emanuel said this month at a graduation ceremony for police recruits, vowing, "We will not rest" until that trend is reversed.

Grim milestone: Chicago records 500th homicide of 2012

Meanwhile, in New York, "we're preventing crimes before someone is killed," Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said Friday.

New York didn't just reduce homicides — it reduced them by 19.6 percent. And Chicago didn't just have more homicides — it had 15.6 percent more.

Both figures are extraordinary. Last year, homicides fell by about 4 percent in New York, exactly in line with other U.S. cities with populations greater than 1 million, according to FBI figures. They fell in Chicago by just less than three-quarters of 1 percent.

While there's always the chance that the changes are just statistical flukes, two concrete factors appear to be at least partly responsible: money and priorities.

New York's police budget held steady in fiscal 2012, at about $4.6 billion.

Emanuel, facing a $300 million budget deficit, by contrast cut $67 million from the $1.3 billion police budget — a 5 percent reduction that was down from his original proposal to cut police funding by 15 percent.

While Emanuel and Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said the cuts would help the police department become more efficient, Jens Ludwig, a criminal justice expert at the University of Chicago, said it was difficult "to think that you could have budget cuts like these and have no impact on crime and other aspects of public life."

Watch US News crime videos on NBCNews.com

"I have been really surprised at how little attention the local and state budget situation has received in discussions about the Chicago violence problem," Ludwig told NBC News on Friday.

The other factor is commitment, Ludwig said. 

"New York City seems to be exceptionally focused on getting illegal guns off the street," he said.

Ludwig drew an analogy to prosecution of drunken driving.

At one time, the official attitude was that "if the driver is lucky enough not to hurt anyone, it's no big deal," he said. "But (eventually) we started to realize drunk driving imposes probabilistic harm, and so we started to punish the risky behavior rather than focus on the luck of the draw about whether anyone happened to get hurt.

"New York City has taken that idea seriously for illegal gun carrying, recognizing that illegal guns on the street greatly increase the risk that an argument turns into a murder," he said.

Kelly, the New York police commissioner, stressed that point Friday, saying his officers had taken 8,000 weapons "out of the hands of people we stop, 800 of them illegal handguns." 

"We're preventing crimes before someone is killed and before someone else has to go to prison for murder or other serious crimes," he said.

New York City homicides, shootings at modern record lows

Bloomberg made a similar point, singling out what he called the city's renewed commitment to Operation Impact, a 2003 state initiative that pairs new police recruits with veteran officers in specific high-crime areas. The city's participation "reflects our commitment to doing everything possible to stop gun violence," he said.

Left unmentioned was the city's controversial stop-and-frisk policy, which allows officers to search someone as he or she exits a private building if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that the person is likely to commit a crime.

"I think there is some empirical basis to think that all those hundreds and thousands of stops and searches for illegal guns helps keep guns off the street and contributes to a lower homicide rate," Ludwig said.

But the policy is under legal challenge from civil liberties groups, which contend that police use it as a pretext to stop and search people without cause — the great majority of them members of minority groups.

According to an analysis of raw arrest statistics by the nonprofit Center for Constitutional Rights, which opposes the policy, 84 percent of the 686,000 people stopped and searched in 2011 were African-American or Latino. Only 6 percent of the stops resulted in an arrest. And in only 2 percent of stops were illegal weapons or other contraband actually found.

Read the full report (.pdf)

Statistics like that make it worth asking "whether stop and frisk is worth the cost," Ludwig said. "All the stops come disproportionately to young, minority males." 

A trial date is set for March. In the meantime, Bloomberg said Friday, New York remains "the safest big city in America."

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Stan Honda / AFP - Getty Images

A New York Police Department officer directs cars at a Shell gasoline station on First Avenue and East 96th Street on Nov. 9 as New York City begins to ration gas according to license plate number.

Gasoline rationing for drivers in New York City has been extended through Friday.

The odd-even license plate system for gasoline and diesel purchase, instituted on Nov. 9 following the aftereffects of superstorm Sandy, was scheduled to end on Monday.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced Sunday he was extending the emergency order, even as the long lines at the pump have diminished. Bloomberg noted the major travel week ahead due to Thanksgiving.

"The odd-even license plate system has worked well and helped to reduce wait times and lines at the pump," Bloomberg said in a statement. "With 30 percent of gas stations still closed and a major travel week coming, I am extending the successful odd-even system on gas and diesel fuel purchases to ensure we do not risk going back to the extreme lines we saw prior to the system being implemented."

Sandy caused significant flooding and damage to petroleum infrastructure throughout the tri-state area, forcing terminals and distribution networks in the region to close. An estimated 30 percent of gas stations in New York still are not operating, and this week is historically one of the heaviest travel weeks of the year, Bloomberg said.

Gasoline rationing on Long Island was lifted at midnight on Friday after eight days. New Jersey lifted its rationing after 10 days.

Some drivers in the Big Apple complained that the rationing was inconvenient. 

“I don’t like it because it doesn’t serve the purpose of getting gas when you need it,” Luis De Pena, 63, told The New York Times. The retired nursing attendant in Manhattan said had to wait an extra day to fill up his car because he did not have the right license plate.

On Thursday, New York state notified 13 gas station operators it's going after them for violating the state law against price gouging.

The 13 stations include two in Nassau County, three in Suffolk County, two in Westchester County, one in Brooklyn, three in Queens and two in the Bronx.

Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said his office has received "hundreds of complaints" about price gouging after the storm.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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David Friedman / NBC News

City sanitation workers pick up debris from Superstorm Sandy outside the Breezy Point community polling place at St. Genevieve Church on Tuesday, Nov. 6, in Breezy Point, N.Y.

NEW YORK – The city is embarking on an unprecedented reconstruction program to swiftly repair homes damaged by Superstorm Sandy, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Friday. The program will be mostly paid for by the federal government and aims to get some people home early next week, he said.

The program, called New York City Rapid Repair, will deploy general contractors who will oversee the work in the hard-hit areas. Those contractors will manage electricians, plumbers, carpenters and others to complete the repairs, Bloomberg said. The Federal Emergency Management Agency is supporting the project and will pay for most if not all of it, he added.

“For a homeowner to go off on their own and find somebody who was available and willing to show up is a daunting task,” he said at a news conference. “We’re changing the game. Today, we’re launching a program that will start returning people to their homes as early as next week. … Its goal is to get as many New Yorkers as possible back in their homes by the end of the year.”

Some 90,000 households in New York City and Long Island remained without power Friday. Some homes need simple repairs to get up and running, while others will need major work.

The program will begin with the easiest houses to fix, with those that have received a green card -- indicating they are sound -- from the buildings department, Bloomberg said. The buildings department has already examined some 80,000 homes.

To register, people must either visit one of the city’s restoration centers, call the information line (311) or sign up online. They must call FEMA to get an identification number. Bloomberg said. The first wave of applicants must have received a green card and be on a street where power has been restored.

Signup begins Tuesday. Work will start soon afterward.

Bloomberg said the program, which is optional, was unprecedented and “will save the city, state and federal government a lot of money and that’s because contractors will be able to work on multiple buildings at once and not just one house at a time.”

Contractors will work over the weekend with the buildings department to identify the homes that will be in the first wave of repairs.

The program “will go a long ways in our recovery, but I will say it won’t fix everything,” Bloomberg said. “In the hardest hit places like Breezy Point, homes were completely destroyed and some of the buildings that are standing will need major structural work before they can be lived in again. For those families, we’re working on housing options that we’ll have more to say about next week.”

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Updated at 1:29 a.m. ET: Residents of the Northeast eager to get out and about after Superstorm Sandy's rampage discovered Wednesday that they couldn't get very far.

As sunshine spread over the area for the first time since Sandy hit the coast Monday, there were some signs of progress from authorities working round the clock to restore the region to its usual hustle and bustle:

• Wall Street reopened Wednesday.
• Three of seven flooded East River tunnels in New York City were cleared of water Wednesday. Full bus service was restored before being suspended overnight in southern parts of Manhattan. Some train service resumed.
• Very limited subway service was set to resume Thursday — none of it, however, south of 34th Street in Manhattan because of stubborn power failures.
• Two of the area's three major airports — Kennedy in New York and Newark Liberty in New Jersey — reopened with restricted service. New York's LaGuardia Airport was projected to reopen Thursday with limited flight schedules.
• The New York Marathon will go on as planned Sunday, race and city officials said. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said power should be restored to most of the city by then.

"We will get up and get this rebuilt," New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said as he surveyed the state's battered coastline with President Barack Obama. And Bloomberg said, "We are on our way back to normal."

For some New Yorkers, it's back to business as usual

But residents who ventured out might not have noticed it.

New York City's beating heart, its 108-year-old subway system, remained largely crippled. Many tunnels connecting the city with its outer boroughs and New Jersey remained closed or restricted. The region's airports offered only minimal service. Packed buses sped past lines stretching around entire city blocks. Many intersections were closed because of accidents caused by inoperative traffic signals.

Subway-dependent businesses see traffic slow to halt

To ease the gridlock, Bloomberg ordered that only cars carrying three or more people would be allowed into the city across four East Side bridges Thursday. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, meanwhile, authorized transit officials to waive fares on all commuter railways, subways and buses through Friday night.

Connecticut Gov. Dannel P Malloy announced that commuter rail service between Stamford and New York's Grand Central Terminal will resume Thursday morning, and that rail fares for Metro-North service would be waived Thursday and Friday.

Slideshow: Sandy slams into East Coast

Superstorm Sandy made landfall Monday evening on a destructive and deadly path across the Northeast.

Launch slideshow

Resident Anthony Sessions set out from Manhattan for Brooklyn to see for himself what Sandy had left behind.

"It took five buses to get to downtown Brooklyn," Sessions told NBC News. "I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge because of the work in Stuyvesant Town.

"I had no idea what had happened," he said.

Many people turned to rental car agencies for transportation, only to find that they had few cars to rent.

"It's people saying, 'I'm stuck; I've got to get out of here,'" Richard Broome, a spokesman for Hertz Rent-a-Car, told NBC News. "For this kind of activity, you only see it during truly catastrophic events — major natural disasters and, for example, 9/11."

In any event, gas was scarce at the few stations that were open, and lines to get it were backed up as long as an hour.

On one side of an Exxon station in Belleville, N.J., cars stretched down the street, snarling traffic. On the other, people stood in line with gas cans in hand, grabbing as much fuel as they could for cars and generators.

A man from Montclair said his girlfriend's car ran out of fuel in line at another Exxon station. He offered money to people for their empty gas cans, hoping to carry away as much fuel as possible, but he didn't have any takers.

The station's owner told NBC News that the pumps would run out of fuel about 8 p.m. ET. He said Exxon had a new shipment of gas on the way but that it wouldn't be in time to help anyone Wednesday night.

Price gouging was becoming a concern, especially in New Jersey, where about 100 people had called the attorney general's office to complain.

"Some gas stations have raised their prices by 20 to 30 percent in one day," Neal Buccino, a spokesman for the state's Division of Consumer Affairs, told NBC News. "Some hardware stores have doubled the price they charge for generators overnight."

Sandy likely to hit car buyers in the wallet

'We need more fuel'
News agency tallies indicated that Sandy killed at least 63 people in the U.S. after it came ashore Monday night. More than half — 34 — were in New York City, officials told NBC News.

Many of those were drownings on Staten Island, where rescuers going house to house were finding people floating inside their homes, NBC New York reported.

BreakingNews.com's coverage of Sandy

Sandy's effects were still vividly evident from the Atlantic coast to as far inland as Chicago:

• About 6 million homes and businesses — two-thirds in New Jersey and New York — were still without power. Ninety percent of Long Island was without power, and it could take as long as 10 days to restore all service, Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., told MSNBC TV.
• Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius declared a public health emergency for New York, helping to make sure Medicare, Medicaid and children's health beneficiaries continue to receive services.
• About 500 patients at New York City's Bellevue Hospital were evacuated to other hospitals after floodwaters crippled its equipment and power supply.
• New York City schools will be closed the rest of the week, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said.
• Sewage was backing up into homes near a flooded sewage plant in Nassau County on Long Island. Authorities feared that it could spread to thousands of homes.
• The U.N. Security Council had to move because of water damage to parts of U.N. headquarters in Manhattan.
• More than 3 feet of snow had fallen in parts of West Virginia, where 220,000 homes and businesses were without power Wednesday afternoon. Red House, Md., got 30 inches of snow.
• In Chicago, forecasters warned that high waves and flooding were possible on the Lake Michigan shore Wednesday. Sandy caused waves up to two stories high on the Great Lakes, forcing cargo ships — some longer than three football fields — to seek shelter.
• In New Haven, Conn., Sandy blew down a tree that uprooted human remains and what appeared to be a time capsule.
• More than 70 percent of homes remained without power in Greenwich, Conn., where downed trees littered the landscape. In Westport, 85 percent of customers still had no power.

Much of New Jersey, where the storm made landfall, remained in dire straits. Aerial footage Wednesday showed fires raging among storm-damaged homes and sand pushed inland.

Christie ordered that Halloween trick-or-treating be moved to Monday because of the unsafe conditions. Many communities in Connecticut also delayed trick-or-treating.

Hoboken, just across from Manhattan, became a virtual island. At least 20,000 people — about 40 percent of the population — remained stranded Wednesday as 500 million gallons of water overwhelmed the town. Authorities said it would take at least two days to pump all the water out.

The National Guard showed up Wednesday to deliver equipment, food and supplies, but much more is needed, Hoboken Mayor Dawn Zimmer said.

"We need more food," Zimmer told NBC News. "We need more resources, so anyone who's listening to this in the city of Hoboken or neighboring towns who can who can get to us, we ask you to come and deliver your supplies."

Particularly critical: "We truly need, we need more fuel," she said.

In Brigantine, Obama, Christie and Anthony Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, comforted residents and vowed that every possible resource would be made available.

"We are here for you, and we will not forget," Obama said. "We will follow up to make sure you get all the help you need to rebuild."

Obama praised Christie for putting "his heart and soul into making sure the people of New Jersey bounce back stronger than before."

Christie, in turn, said he and Obama had "a great working relationship." He thanked Obama "for his concern and his compassion for the people of our state," saying it was important to have the president "acknowledge all the suffering that's going on here in New Jersey."

That suffering is likely to stretch for months in New Jersey, where at least 2 million customers remained without electricity.

"All the houses on the oceanfront on the north end of my town — all their bottoms have been washed away," said Thomas Boyd, the police chief in Seaside Heights. "Their foundations are gone."

In Point Pleasant Beach, one of the hardest-hit areas, Lisa and Rich Morico carried away what they could as they left their home for what was likely to be a very long time — "I have no idea" how long, Rich Morico said.

Looking over the remains of their home, he admitted: "I don't want to say in front of my wife."

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Justin Lane / EPA

A police officer crosses over police tape at a closed subway station on Tuesday after Sandy drenched New York City.

Updated at 9:16 p.m. ET: The unprecedented surge from Sandy’s floodwaters took a bite out of the core of the Big Apple's infrastructure, knocking out power to electrical substations and crippling a subway system used daily by more than 4 million people.

The storm’s impact should be a wake-up call that the city – and the rest of the nation – needs to better prepare for the dangers of the coastal flooding, which is likely to become more frequent in the decades ahead, experts say.

For now, the loss of power and a way to get around adds up to a major headache for many New Yorkers, and a hazard to some.

“The work of getting our mass transit grid and our power grid restored … is going to take more time and a lot of patience,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said at a Tuesday morning press conference. “Our administration will move heaven and earth to help them.”

New York’s subway system, one of the largest – and oldest – mass-transit systems in the world, was shut down Monday in advance of the superstorm.

Bloomberg said Tuesday it could be “a good four or five days” before subways are back up and running, though Metropolitan Transit Authority Chairman Joseph Lhota cautioned it's too early to say how long it will take to restore full service. 

Floodwaters swamped at least seven subway tunnels under the East River, and transit officials called the damage unprecedented.

“The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night,” Lhota said in a statement. “Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on our entire transportation system, in every borough and county of the region. It has brought down trees, ripped out power and inundated tunnels, rail yards and bus depots.”

Bloomberg said the advance shutdown and the MTA’s temporary moving of much of its “rolling stock” of trains to higher ground may have spared the system from even more serious damage.

But the immediate fix for the flooded system isn’t simply pumping water out of the tunnels.

Unlike rainwater, the corrosive saltwater whipped up by Sandy could damage much of the subways’ electrical parts and equipment, says Radley Horton, an associate research scientist with the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University.

Reuters

A boat rests on tracks at Metro-North's Ossining Station on the Hudson Line on Tuesday in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, in New York.

“Saltwater and electricity don’t mix. Even after that water is removed, it’s going to take some time to replace the electrical equipment, test signals, that sort of thing,” Horton says.

In a statement released Tuesday night, MTA Chairman Joseph Lhota cited "unprecedented challenges" the transportation authority faces as it tries to restore service, including flooding "up to the ceiling in the city's South Ferry subway station and  43 million gallons of water in each tube of the Hugh L. Carey Tunnel.

Lhota said city buses are back on the road for limited service and will almost be at normal strength by morning.

Other potentially serious infrastructure damage wrought by Sandy, according to Horton:

• Electrical generation – Some major distribution points were reported out. Con Edison said Tuesday that 780,000 homes and business lost power. The utility cut electricity to some areas to save its equipment and a transformer exploded at a plant on 14th Street in Manhattan, blacking out others. Con Ed officials called the power failures “the largest storm-related outage in our history.”
• Wastewater treatment plants – New Yorkers rely on these facilities to treat sewage and wastewater from homes and businesses before releasing it into waterways surrounding the city. Located at sites around the city, many of these plants were overwhelmed during Hurricane Irene last year.

Many of the city’s major roadways and bridges seem to have escaped catastrophic damage. Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced that five of the MTA’s seven bridges were fully inspected and reopened at noon on Tuesday. The two Rockaway bridges, Cross Bay Veterans Memorial and Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges bridges, and the Hugh L. Carey and Queens Midtown Tunnel remain closed. Buses were being phased back into service, with a full schedule expected for Wednesday. 

Slideshow: Sandy slams into East Coast

Andrew Burton / Getty Images

Superstorm Sandy made landfall Monday evening on a destructive and deadly path across the Northeast.

Launch slideshow

Authorities were still assessing damage to New York's three major airports, and thousands of flights were canceled across the Northeast. "We are focused on reopening as quickly as possible. But we will not compromise safety," Pasquale DiFulco, a spokesman for the Port Authority, told Reuters. "We need to walk the runways and make sure there's no debris."

The damage was so severe that Sandy should serve a wake-up call to cities around the world about the extreme threat posed by coastal flooding, scientists say.

Klaus Jacob, a geophysicist and senior research scientist at Columbia University, told PRI’s The World:

“We had one wake-up call last year under the name of Irene. We got away with less than we will most likely incur from Sandy,” says Jacob. “The question is how many wake-up calls do we need to get out of our snoozing, sleeping, dreaming morning attitude? We have to get into action. We have to set priorities and spend money. For every one dollar invested in protection you get a return of four dollars of not-incurred losses.”

Horton, who was on a blue-ribbon commission that in 2009 examined the MTA and environmental sustainability, said one of the report’s main recommendations was to focus on flexible approaches in adapting to climate hazards.

“In some ways this is the greatest transit system in the world, but I think we’re in uncharted waters,” Horton told NBC News.

Insurance may soften blow of Sandy's economic hit 

“I hope this storm is a wake-up call not just to our region …. but also nationally to help get adaptation on the map and help people understand the extent to which sea level rise will increase the frequency of coastal flooding events,” Horton said.

“Even if storms do not become stronger in the future and we get a relatively small amount of sea level rise, the frequency of coastal flooding events may triple by end of this century simply because the average sea level will be higher.”

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo agreed that officials need to think about ways to better protect the nation's most populous city from storms that have been increasing in both intensity and frequency.

“We have to resist the temptation for people to say, 'This is a once-in-a-100-years event; let’s just fix it and move forward,’” Cuomo was quoted as saying.

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