For the record we didn’t get power back completely until yesterday afternoon. Granted we did get it back for about 5 hours on Tuesday. This relief was short-lived when an explosion near the manholes up the block took everything down again. So today with the power of electricity I stumbled upon this article.
Here are some key lines:

Power company Con Edison initially said fewer than 2,000 customers were affected, but it increased that number tenfold Friday morning to 25,000 customers.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg estimated that would translate to about 100,000 people considering that each “customer” could be more than one household in an area where homes are often sectioned into multiple units, and could even be an entire apartment building.

“The sad thing is, this shouldn’t have happened,” Bloomberg said. “We don’t know why, but the most important thing — make sure nobody dies or gets hurt and then help Con Ed to get it back up.”

Some of our neighbors called ConEd just to be told they wouldn’t even have an estimate for the length of outage till the next morning. The best part, no one worked on our block the entire night of Tuesday. Not one ConEd Guy. As the pictures show our block was literally on fire twice. How could they not be working on our block?

Consolidated Edison spokesman Chris Olert said the revised number followed a block-by-block cable inspection in northwest Queens on Thursday night. It said previous estimates came from the number of customers who called to complain.

I guess this is how the block by block check will go… Genius.