FARMINGDALE, N.Y. — FARMINGDALE, N.Y. - Vincent Pina finally saw a couple of utility trucks moving down his street Thursday and started to wave in anticipation. But they just cruised past his house and kept on going.
He hung his head in resignation.
“The thing that gets me the most is that there is noflood damage. I don’t have any branches down. I have no wires down,” said the Long Islander, who put a handpainted sign out front that read: “Still No Power.”
So why, he wondered, was it taking so long to get electricity?
A week and a half after Hurricane Sandy slammed the coast and inflicted tens of billions of dollars in damage, hundreds of thousands of customers in New York andNew Jersey are still waiting for the electricity to return, and lots of cold and tired people are losing patience. Some are demanding investigations of utilities they say aren’t working fast enough.
An angry New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo joined the calls for an investigation Thursday, ripping the utilities as unprepared and badly managed.
“Privately I have used lan-guage my daughters couldn’t hear,” he fumed. He added: “It’s unacceptable the longer it goes on because the longer it goes on, people’s suffering is worse.”
The power companies have said they are dealing with damage unprecedented in its scope and doing the best they can. And there is no denying the magnitude of what they have done: At the peak, more than 8.5 million homes and businesses across 21 states lost power. As of Thursday, that was down to about 750,000, almost entirely in New York and New Jersey.
And that’s after a nor’easter overnight knocked out power to more than 200,000 customers in New York and New Jersey, erasing some of the progress made by utility crews.
The mounting criticism came as New York City and Long Island followed New Jersey’s lead and announced oddeven gasoline rationing to deal with fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations; the Federal Emergency Management Agency started delivering mobile homes to the region; and Cuomo said the storm could cost New York state alone $33 billion.
New Jersey did not have a damage estimate of its own, but others have put Sandy’s overall toll at up to $50 billion, making it the second most-expensive storm in U.S. history, behind Hurricane Katrina, which swamped New Orleans in 2005.
Sandy killed more than 100 people in 10 states, with most of the dead in New York and New Jersey.
The power industry’s defenders have pointed out that Sandy was huge and hit the nation’s most densely populated corridor. By the Energy Department’s reckoning, it left more people in the dark than any other storm in U.S. history.
It did more than knock down power lines; it flooded switching stations and substations, forcing workers to take apart hundreds of intricate components, clean them, replace some of them, rewire others and put it all back together. Only after these stations are re-energized can workers go out and repair lines.
Around the region, though, customers were frustrated and in some cases furious, complaining that they were being left in the dark about when power would be restored.
Ralph Barone of Staten Island said he saw a Consolidated Edison crew in his neighborhood on Thursday for the first time since Sandy killed the power.
“The problem is that they won’t tell you anything about when the electricity will come back,” he said. “My wife is freezing. You need a flashlight to use the bathroom. It gets old.”
Cuomo appears to be all by himself among the New York area’s big three politicians. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended Consolidated Edison and said it has done a good job in recent years. And New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie praised the utilities, saying he expects all of the state to have power back by early Sunday. New Jersey had about 400,000 failures Thursday.
“The villain in this case is Hurricane Sandy,” Christie said.
On Long Island, where more than 262,000 customers were without power and tempers were rising, Long Island Power Authority spokesman Mark Gross would not comment on the criticism, saying only that the utility is focused on restoring power.
Consolidated Edison’s chief executive, Kevin Burke, said he expects the power failures to be fixed in a couple of days, and added, “I’m very sorry that so many people are suffering because their lights are out.”
The Edison Electric Institute, the industry’s main lobbying group, has called restoring power in Sandy’s wake the “single biggest task the utility industry has ever faced.” BrianWolff, the group’s senior vice president, said 67,000 utility workers from all around the country are on the job.
“An hour without power is too long. Power is an essential commodity. Our people get that. We are putting every resource to restoring power,” he said. But he added, “This was not a minor event.”
Even David Wright, president of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners, sounded a sympathetic note: “There are limits to what a utility can do. A superstorm is an extraordinary event, and in an extraordinary event you get extraordinary circumstances.”
Meanwhile, the federal government is moving manufactured housing into areas in New York and New Jerseythat were hit hardest by Sandy, FEMA said Thursday.
FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said the disaster-relief agency has several hundred mobile homes in its inventory of emergency supplies and hasstarted moving some of them to disaster zone. He said it is unclear yet if FEMA will need to order more of the temporary homes.
FEMA was widely criticized for using trailers after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated New Orleans and parts of the Gulf Coast in 2005 after many of those trailers were later found to contain toxic levels of formaldehyde.
Fugate said the mobile homes being sent to New York and New Jersey have been approved by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The mobile homes being used for this storm are not the same kind that were used after Katrina and Rita, FEMA said.
Information for this article was contributed by Kiley Armstrong, Jonathan Fahey, Colleen Long, David B. Caruso, Jennifer Peltz, Mike Gormley, Jim Fitzgerald, Wayne Parry and Alicia A. Caldwell of The Associated Press.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 11/09/2012