2.5 million still without power in New York area

One day after Tropical Storm Isaias swept through the New York region, snapping trees and branches, utility crews were struggling to restore power to nearly 2.5 million customers as officials acknowledged that some outages could linger for days.

On Wednesday morning, the most widespread outages were reported in northern New Jersey, suburbs just north of New York City and much of the entire state of Connecticut.

The scale of the damage was extensive: Con Edison reported that the outage in its service area in New York City and Westchester County was second only to Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

“We’ve had over 16,000 service requests for downed trees, which I think is the most we’ve ever had in the city,” Deanne Criswell, the city’s emergency management commissioner, said in an interview Wednesday morning with the television station WPIX.

Gov. Philip Murphy of New Jersey said at a news conference Wednesday morning that while many people should expect to have their power restored Wednesday, some outages could continue for longer.

“We’ve got to be very realistic,” the governor said. “This could be a number of days for folks.”

He said earlier Wednesday that the damage could have been worse if the storm had not moved so quickly through the area.

“Like a knife through hot butter,’’ he told a local radio station.

By Wednesday morning, the immediate threat of strong winds and heavy rains had passed, as the storm had crossed into Canada and was expected to dissipate Thursday.

But reports of damage could be found all along the path that Isaias took up the East Coast on Tuesday after making landfall in North Carolina. The storm left a trail of flood and fires, with some of its most devastating effects caused by a series of tornadoes that it spawned in several states.