Right; there have been several storms more “historic” than this. I’ll defer to the New Englanders as to what is historic in their areas, but for NJ this is far from it.
Some of the more damaging storms were simply early enough to cause damage because so many leaves were still in the trees; a few years back we had a storm right before Halloween that took out a lot of power lines (and for that winter we never saw as much snowfall as that October storm, which wasn’t a lot of snow but just at an inopportune time).
South Jersey for years now has a situation where changing weather patterns (certainly not “warming”) are often giving them more snow that northeastern Jersey; prior to that their climate was compared to that of South Carolina.
Yes, that is strange
That storm taught me a lot about preparedness. When Sandy hit, I was ready with food, gas, coffee, and ordnance. My power stayed on (miraculously) but three to four days later, with power still out the gas stations became donnybrooks. Everyone with generators seems to have only a few cans of gas. There were reports of fights breaking out, people cutting in line, and so on.
As such, it only takes 96 hours of no electricity for civilization to collapse.