“Thank God for family,” she said as she headed for her son’s home in Rahway, N.J.  Lester Williams, 50, another resident in Ms. Mitchell’s 27-unit building, was even worse off. “We lost everything,” said Mr. Williams, a single parent.  His children, Sandrell, 7, and Swalik, 5, who sat patiently outside in the family’s silver Grand Prix, would normally have been in class at Washington School, across Main Street. But the elementary school was one of many across the state that remained closed for a second day, and fire hoses snaked from inside the building’s front doors, disgorging floodwater.  “I don’t know what move to make from here,” Mr. Williams said. “I’m so lost I don’t know what to do right now.” In his apartment, a picture of his niece, two Matchbox cars and a puzzle piece sat on a bureau near the kitchen, a soggy still life.  The storm killed Niranjankumar Soni, 52, of Edison, who was trapped in a car in a flooded underpass in Woodbridge, and Nicholas Pennucci, 79, of Bloomfield, who apparently drowned next to his car on a flooded street in Belleville.  In Mahwah, the police were searching the Ramapo River on Tuesday for Mary Pat Wagner, 43, who was last seen driving home from a party on Saturday night. Along a river bank near Route 202, the police had found a side-view mirror that may have come from her car, Capt. Stephen Jaffe of the Mahwah police told The Associated Press.  Mr. Codey, who declared a state of emergency on Monday, said that most of the major rivers in New Jersey, including the Delaware and the Raritan, had crested and were receding on Tuesday afternoon. On Wednesday, his office said, Mr. Codey planned to take an aerial tour to assess the damage.  In Mamaroneck, where more than seven inches of rain fell Sunday and Monday, merchants on Tuesday were clearing out the soggy remnants of their stores.  A. J. Martello, the owner of a pump and drain company in nearby Port Chester, was charging $600 an hour for a pump that can drain 1,600 gallons an hour. He said business was booming. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen, and I thought the last was the worst,” Mr. Martello said. “Look at the devastation. It’s like our little Hurricane Katrina.”  Officials in Westchester County urged flood victims to document damage and contact their town or the county about losses so that officials could provide a detailed picture as they apply for federal aid.  In Mamaroneck, National Guard troops were stationed at stoplights along Mamaroneck Avenue, which was lined with trucks from utility companies and various fire departments that were assisting homeowners and businesses that had been flooded.  Mayor Philip Trifiletti estimated that damage in his village alone would run in the tens of millions of dollars.  Mr. Trifiletti said that as of Tuesday morning, about 100 Mamaroneck residents remained in shelters, though he said he hoped to have 99 percent of them back in their homes by the weekend.  “For everything to return to normal, I think will take two to three weeks at least,” he said.  Several major roads in New York and New Jersey also were still flooded Tuesday. A five-mile stretch of the Bronx River Parkway — from the Sprain Brook Parkway to Scarsdale Road in Yonkers — was closed. In New Jersey, 14 stretches of highway were partly shut down or closed, though the number was down from 70 such sections on Monday.  The receding water revealed swaths of devastation from Fire Island, where houses teetered on their stilts on a washed-away beach, to Staten Island, where a retaining wall was washed away and left five multifamily homes deserted and in danger of collapsing.  Through the rain and the flood and the muck, there was one silver lining. In New Jersey, residents affected by the storm were assured of an additional two days to file their federal and state tax returns, which must be postmarked by midnight Thursday and marked “April 16 storm.”  School board elections also were postponed in Bound Brook, Manville and Fairfield Township; no makeup dates had been set. Mike Yaple, a spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association, said the last time elections were postponed was in 1982, when a blizzard crippled the northern part of the state.  For the second day, classes were canceled at the Piscataway and New Brunswick campuses of Rutgers University.  In Lodi, Ms. Mitchell — who had been doing her spring cleaning before the floodwater came — said she would be looking for a new apartment. “Two floods is enough,” she said. “I’m not waiting for another.”  Abby Gruen contributed reporting from Larchmont, John Holl from Jersey City and Barbara Whitaker from Mamaroneck.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Assessing Damage And Mopping Up As Water Recedes. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The New York City region took stock and mopped up on Tuesday from the rainiest April storm on record.