VOTING in a the US presidential election is the latest challenge for the hundreds of thousands of people in the New York-New Jersey area still affected by Superstorm Sandy.
The campaigns of both President Barack Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney have long assumed that the heavily Democratic region would support Obama, but voters were taking special election shuttles from storm-hit areas and voting by affidavit from any polling place they could reach after officials put emergency measures in place.
Early turnout at dawn appeared high, despite the hurdles.
"No matter what happens - hurricanes, tornados - it's our day to vote," said Agim Coma, a 25-year-old construction worker who lost his apartment and car to the storm but was first in line to vote in one New Jersey town.
Tens of thousands of people along the Atlantic coast, many of them in public housing projects, continued to scramble for housing options a week after the storm as nighttime temperatures remained near freezing and power had not yet returned. A few desperate people burned their furniture.
And officials despaired at the news of yet another storm approaching the region on Wednesday, smaller than Sandy but with the potential for more power outages, rising waters, heavy rain and gusts of up to 96 km/h.
But housing was the most pressing problem.
"It's not going to be a simple task. It's going to be one of the most complicated and long-term recovery efforts in US history," said Mark Merritt, president of Witt Associates, a Washington crisis management consulting firm founded by former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) director James Lee Witt.
FEMA said it has already dispensed close to $US200 million ($A193.90 million) in emergency housing assistance and had put 34,000 people in New York and New Jersey up in hotels and motels. But local, state and federal officials have yet to lay out a specific, comprehensive plan for finding them long-term places to live in an already densely developed region around the largest US city.
Officials had yet to even establish the magnitude of the problem.
In New Jersey, state officials said they were still trying to figure out how many people will need long-term housing. At least 4000 residents were in New Jersey shelters.
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