Updates to Services in Long Island After Hurricane Sandy Nassau and Suffolk Counties announced Thursday that they would end gas rationing at 11:59 p.m. Vehicles had been designated to fill up on alternate days, based on license plate number, since Nov. 9. In the latest tweak to its Web site, the Long Island Power Authority as of Thursday night was showing that only 1,743 customers in Nassau County and 441 in Suffolk who could accept power after Hurricane Sandy were still without electricity. That is a significant improvement over a week ago, when more than 200,000 customers on Long Island were in the dark. But whereas the authority had been providing an online count of homes too damaged for reconnection in past days on its chart of power failures, it has redesigned the way the information is presented so that the homes are no longer represented on the chart or accounted for in a nearby footnote or link. Two temporary shelters continue to operate on Long Island, housing about 450 displaced people. The biggest cohort, 425 of them, have been guests of the makeshift shelter the Red Cross is operating at Nassau Community College, while the rest have been at the Red Cross shelter in Bohemia, according to Craig Cooper, a spokesman for the organization. Not all of those people have homes to go back to. Public officials consider the scarcity of rental housing a particularly thorny challenge. The type of short-term housing assistance that the federal government has made available in past disasters like Hurricane Katrina typically covers stopgap measures like rental housing rather than emergency repairs to one's primary home. According to Nassau County's Web site, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has agreed to bring in contractors to certain areas to perform basic repairs "so that residents can return to their homes while more long-term repairs are in progress." Homeowners who register for the program would be eligible for assistance under both the Sheltering and Temporary Essential Power program and the Individuals and Households Program.