It’s More Or Less 2,000

The 2,000 customers without power in Astoria is actually about 100,000 people:

The number of people who have been without power in Queens for five days now is actually closer to 100,000, not the figure of 2,000 customers that officials of Consolidated Edison had cited in previous days.

At a press conference in Queens, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called the discrepancy annoying, and said that Con Edison apparently based its earlier count on the number of customers who complained to the utility company that they had no power, and not on any systematic assessment of the power outage.

“I think what is annoying is that their first estimate was done based on phone calls,” the mayor said, saying he should have directed them earlier just to drive around the area to get an actual count of the number of people whose power was out.

. . .

The mayor said that he suspected on Thursday that the utility company’s estimate of 2,000 customers without power — a ‘customer’ could be one person or one building with many residents — was probably low.

“They cannot tell from their computers,” Mr. Bloomberg said on a radio call-in program earlier today. “Their estimates at the beginning were based on how many people called up and said, ‘My power’s not working.’ You can question whether that’s an intelligent way to do it.”

The only way to tell, he said, would be to actually see which buildings had no power, he said, so on Thursday, he “demanded that they take a look, and they drove down almost every street.”

“It got so late that, apparently, at that point, they said, ‘Well, everybody’s gone to bed, you don’t know whether people have power, you can’t tell from looking,’ and they tried to actually look,” he said.

“If it was one house in a block that didn’t have lights on, you assumed that there’s power there because typically everybody in that block would be out, or nobody,” he said. “If all of the block is dark, they assume that all of those people are without power.”

Based on that survey, they concluded that 25,000 customers were without power. At the news conference in Queens, the mayor said that meant around 100,000 people.

Not to worry, power should be back on by Sunday barring heavy rain . . . whoops.