Oh puh-leeze. Do I detect a bit of hyperbole in the coverage of this event? Let's start with the title that someone decided to bestow: "the GREAT Queens Blackout". The latest estimates from the utility were that 25,000 customers were without power, which Mayor Bloomberg said translated into 100,000 residents. This works out to less than 5 percent of the population of Queens and a bit over 1 percent of the population of New York City as a whole. For a contemporary comparison, about four times as many people in the St. Louis area are still without power due to storm damage four days ago.
If the current Queens outage qualifies as a "great" blackout, then how should we describe the blackout of 2003 that affected most of the Great Lakes region and some bits of the Northeast, including all of New York City? Not to mention other occasions when the entire city went dark, such as 1977 and 1965.
Bob Goudreau Cary, NC