Unless you lived in on the coast, that Halloween Noreaster WAS a lot worse than Sandy. Around where I lived so many trees were broken it looked like a war zone. Power off for days, roads, impassable, etc.
That. I'm coastal Connecticut and my area got hammered by Sandy, but the Halloween Nor'Easter wasn't too bad. We lost power in Sandy for 2 full days and only had about 5 hours of outages from the Nor'Easter. I have relatives upstate and it was completely the opposite for them, they got nothing from Sandy and the Nor'Easter was an apocalypse. EVERY SINGLE BLOCK in the northern half of the state looked like this:
If your street was 6 blocks long there would be 20 trees down breaking wires in 20 different places. The process would be:
Plow to get the crews to the first breakage.
Remove trees
Fix wires
Plow to get the crews to the next breakage.
Remove trees
Fix wires
Repeat for EVERY downed tree. The combination required of needing a plowing crew, a tree removal team and the power company linemen to babystep their way down each street fixing dozens of problems one at a time was a nightmare. It was essentially the same sort of damage you'd see from a major hurricane except there was more than a foot of snow covering everything making it that much more complicated to clean up.