Updated at 11:24 p.m. ET: BREEZY POINT, N.Y. -- After waking up to several inches of snow and more than 200,000 new power outages, residents in areas battered by Superstorm Sandy on Thursday got back to the long-term work of rebuilding. 

"Patience is the name of the game here," said Joseph Murray in Breezy Point, where snow from the nor’easter dusted the New York City community destroyed last week by flooding and a fire. 

Families here on Thursday continued efforts to save their waterlogged homes from mold, with some piling items on the layer of snow in 40-degree weather. 

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New York City and Long Island will begin rationing gas to relieve frustration and long lines at the pump, NBCNewYork.com reported. The rationing does not apply to emergency vehicles, taxis or individual gas cans.

Murray, 27, was at his family’s home after sanitation workers cleared out their pile of garbage, leaving three salvageable nightstands and a lamp standing outside. 

"Be patient with Mother Nature  because she doesn’t care about any of us," was how Murray rationalized the bizarre bouts of weather. "Let her do her thing and then when she’s ready to let you do your thing, she will."

Murray did have an eye on Friday’s weather forecast, noting that "it’s going to be 60 degrees, this is all going to melt." 

By late Thursday, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island had their power fully restored. New York and New Jersey saw a drop in the number of customers affected by the nor'easter. Now about 60,000 customers are without power between the two states because of the storm; more than half a million remain without power total in the two states, including outages caused by Sandy.

West Virginia, however, has struggled to bring power customers back online.

The overnight nor’easter boasted wind gusts of more than 50 mph and dropped heavy snow on already-weakened tree limbs, leading to new power outages. 

In New Jersey alone, 167,000 homes and businesses lost power overnight, Gov. Chris Christie said Thursday. "This sets us back about a day" in terms of getting all power restored, he added. 

"We're right back to the same situation," Kirk Walker of Hackensack, N.J., told NBCNewYork.com after power went out for the third time at his home since Sandy struck. 

"They said it was gonna be a rough winter," Walker added. "Sign of things to come, I guess."

Officials there on Thursday said they had convinced the local utility to scrap its policy requiring that each home without power be inspected before power is restored, Newsday.com reported. 

With the new outages, some 700,000 customers were without power across the Northeast around midday. That number was reduced to some 600,000 by early evening.

Are you left in the lurch after Sandy? 

Record snowfall totals were recorded across the area:

• New York’s Central Park received 4.4 inches of snow on Wednesday -- a record for a Nov. 7 and the earliest 4-inch total in the park's history, NBCNewYork.com reported. By Thursday morning the total had reached 4.7 inches.
• Newark, N.J., got 6 inches by Thursday -- more snow in 24 hours than during any previous November on record.
• Bridgeport, Conn., received 3.5 inches of snow, beating the Nov. 7 record of 2 inches set in 1953.

Some areas inland got 12 to 13 inches of snow.

"This is a classic nor'easter," NBC meteorologist Al Roker said on TODAY, "just very early."

PhotoBlog: Hot meals on Staten Island

Conditions were still miserable Thursday morning. In New York City, winds were around 25 mph and it was 36 degrees with showers forecast before sunny skies on Friday.

In New Jersey, parts of which saw 9 inches of snow, police said ice and snow contributed to the deaths of two people in a car whose driver was speeding, NBCPhiladelphia reported.

Two people also died in Connecticut in traffic accidents attributed to snow, The Associated Press reported.

Full NBC coverage of Sandy's aftermath

Hundreds were evacuated ahead of the nor'easter, some because of flooding fears and others due to post-Sandy logistics.

Medeleine Dobriner of New Dorp on Staten Island was among the latter -- having to move because her shelter was in a school that was reopening.

"This is my third shelter and usually change is good," Dobriner, 66, told NBC News, "but not in this case."

Throughout the region, people wore coats indoors as they endured yet another night without heat.

"I thought I was lucky when power was restored last Thursday, but last night it went out again," said Michael Platt, an electrician from Toms River, N.J., who estimated a foot of snow fell in his area. "The kids have been home for nearly two weeks and I'm not working, and when I'm not working I'm not making any money. This hasn't been easy." 

"Can you believe this? Enough is enough," added Cindy Casey, whose Belle Harbor home one block from the beach in the Rockaways was swamped by Sandy, as she looked out at the snow blanketing the neighborhood devastated by flooding and fire. 

Some of those who had weathered Sandy told NBCNewYork.com they felt like a cruel joke was being played on them.

"Kind of laughing about it at this point," said Danny Arnedos, of Oyster Bay, Long Island. "To go from a hurricane to a nor'easter and driving in the snow in 10 days is pretty unbelievable."

"I am waiting for the locusts and pestilence next," New Jersey Gov. Christie said Wednesday. 

Coastal flooding proved minimal, but commuter bus and train services were disrupted by the storm, with the Long Island Rail Road briefly shutting down all operations to the city's eastern suburbs on Wednesday night.

Gasoline remained in short supply in the New York City area, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Thursday announced rationing based on odd and even number license plates.

Official: NY disaster chief fired over tree removal

Airports saw 1,600 canceled flights on Wednesday due to the storm. Some 600 more flights were scratched Thursday, according to the flight tracking service FlightAware. The majority of those are in the New York area.

The losses from Superstorm Sandy are still rough, but New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Thursday he had seen a report estimating $50 billion in damage and economic losses across the region, with $33 billion in New York state.

"That's a staggering number," he said.

NBC's John Makely as well as Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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By Ed Flanagan, NBC News

BEIJING – Hong Kong battened down the hatches Monday and rode out the strongest typhoon to hit the city in 13 years.

For the first time since 1999, Hong Kong raised its Signal 10 typhoon warning – the highest on the city’s weather observatory scale – for several hours Monday evening as typhoon Vicente pounded the region with gale force winds said to have reached speeds as high as 101 miles per hour. 

Hong Kong authorities reported 129 people were injured by the typhoon, with as many as 30 of the injuries caused by flying debris scooped up by the high winds. Seven incidents of flooding were reported in Hong Kong’s New Territories region.

Meanwhile, Beijing suffered through a 10-hour downpour over the weekend that dumped 6.7 inches of rain in parts of the city and as much as 18 inches in the worst hit parts on the outskirts of Beijing in what is being called the worst flooding to hit the Chinese capital in six decades. 

The subsequent severe flooding killed at least 37 people in the country's capital and affected nearly two million people, sparking millions of angry messages and complaints on China’s Twitter-like service, Weibo, in recent days.  Users posted countless home videos and pictures of cars struggling through wheel-deep water, waterfalls cascading down into Beijing's subway entrances and cars being swept away by the currents.

The differing level of destruction between the two cities provoked outrage at Beijing’s government, with critics asking why the city’s infrastructure failed to buffer the storm.

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Hong Kong relatively unscathed in typhoon's aftermath
In Hong Kong, the damage from the typhoon wasn’t nearly as bad. Trees throughout the city were overturned while flying debris reportedly caused some minor structural damage in parts of Hong Kong’s usually busy financial district of Central. The high winds were said to have also whipped up large waves in Hong Kong’s Victoria Harbor which pounded walkways and ferry terminals around the famous city skyline.

 

The brewing storm sent office workers scrambling home as they hurried to avoid a partial public transportation suspension in the lead-up to the storm. Non-essential government offices were also closed early Monday and port and airport authorities shut down operations until the storm passed.

During the worst of the storm in the early hours of Tuesday morning, the BBC reported that 60 flights were cancelled, an additional 60 more delayed and 16 diverted.

By Tuesday 8 a.m. local time, the Hong Kong Observatory reported a weakened Typhoon Vicente was heading away from Hong Kong, allowing public transportation and flights from Hong Kong International Airport to resume. Trade on Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index also resumed earlier Tuesday.

The typhoon is reportedly creeping its way into China’s Guangdong province, where weather experts were warning that Vicente could still dump as much as 12 inches of rain in affected areas.

The typhoon comes as China is experiencing serious weather disturbances throughout the country. Near China’s central metropolis of Chongqing, heavy rains have caused flooding and brought the Three Gorges Dam – the world’s largest hydropower dam – perilously close to its largest flood peak this year.

Critics pound government’s response to Beijing storm

While Hong Kong seemed to weather the storm, nearly every aspect of the government’s response to the Beijing flooding has been criticized by the public, with much of the anger being directed at the shoddy drainage system. Netizens have also been quick to complain about the Beijing municipal government’s lack of preparedness for dealing with the disaster and the city’s failures in weather forecasting and deploying a good storm-warning service.

Beijing officials are saying that economic losses from the storm will surpass $1.5 billion dollars. But the PR hit to the city’s vaunted new infrastructure just four years after its coming out party during the summer Olympics has been far more costly -- especially considering the relatively minor damage suffered by Hong Kong from a major typhoon.

Public outrage over Beijing deaths

“Hong Kong just experienced the biggest typhoon in 13 years, but there are only seven reports of flooding, one report of landslide and no one died,” wrote one angry poster on Weibo comparing the Hong Kong typhoon with Beijing’s flooding. “The media effectively announced the alert, and reported the complaints of its citizens…The whole society functions under the normal rhythm.”

“The rainfall in Beijing and the typhoon in Hong Kong,” stated another irate poster. “Two completely different systems are shown in the same mirror.”

Sensitive to the great public outcry, Weibo began censoring overly critical posts on the subject of the Beijing floods. Citing alleged directives from the Beijing Municipal Committee Department of Propaganda, the China Digital Times posted reputed orders from the department that called for “public opinion guidance concerning yesterday’s rainstorms” in the form of state-run media shifting the focus of its news stories away from issues like the failure of the city’s drainage system to features that “emphasize the power of human compassion over the elements.”

On the edge of the Gobi desert, Beijing has not always had to deal with large rainstorms like Hong Kong, which is regularly in the season path of typhoons in the South China Seas area. Still, with more heavy rains expected later this week, local officials here will certainly be feeling the heat to keep the city largely dry throughout the rest of this rainy season.

NBC News’ Tianzhou Ye contributed to this report.