Poll: What do you miss during power outages?

As customers fumed about the scarcity of repair trucks, the Long Island Power Authority on Tuesday likened the system to a person who was hit by one, with more than 3,000 separate damage locations amounting to "significant trauma."

"If our electric system were a person, we just got run over by a truck and we have to put it back together," LIPA chief Michael Hervey said on a conference call.

At midday, 270,000 of LIPA's 1.2 million customers remained without power.