Power gridlock gave LI a jolt

Living off the grid isn't so juicy, after all.

A few hours or even a day without electricity?

That falls into the tolerable zone. The kids like playing with candles. The iPhone can still be powered in the car. But somewhere around hour 26, when the food's getting stinky in a comatose fridge and the air conditioner's on extended strike, the whole disconnected lifestyle gets awfully tiresome. A no-big-deal adventure becomes a total, maddening pain.

And people start doing crazy things. You can't defend Walter Murphy's alleged method. But his frustration is easy enough to comprehend. Police say the Hicksville man grew so angry by juice-less day number 3, he phoned Nassau emergency management with violent threats for LIPA.

Hey, Walter! Did you ever think they might record those calls?

But even anger-management graduates were asking questions and looking for somebody to blame.

What happens when we get a real hurricane?

Irene, a tropical storm, gave 523,000 Long Island families and businesses a taste of the Unabomber lifestyle. Barely 165,000 of those customers were back on line by Wednesday. On Friday afternoon, 66,000 still couldn't turn the coffee maker on.

Utility execs insisted all week they were doing what they could. No doubt they were trying. But their "slow but steady" power return sure seemed tilted toward the "slow."

Everyone agrees we have to do better next time.

ELECTRIC SLIDE

1. Transistor baseball broadcasts

2. Car-battery cellphone charges

3. Flashlight novels

4. Seeing-eye children

5. Candlelight breakfast, lunch, dinner and midnight snack

ASKED AND UNANSWERED: Why did Lindsay Lohan go to Hollywood's Shamrock Social Club for her Billy Joel tattoo? LI's ink shops aren't good enough? Is that what LiLo (and Joel) mean by "I Go to Extremes"? . . . What about surrogate-birth paternity leave? Why be sexist? . . . Totally stoked that the Quiksilver Pro Surf Competition is coming to Long Beach on Sept. 4-15. But how 'bout a moment of silence -- or better yet, one great ride -- in memory of Long Beach High surfing coach and local wave-rider Daniel Bobis, who was killed while surfing in Indonesia this summer? . . . Any fresh leads on the Northport train-station men's-room attack? It's been three weeks now.

THE NEWS IN SONG: Heart beats water every time: "This City" by Steve Earle, http://tinyurl.com/wontdrown

LONG ISLANDERS OF THE WEEK

THE RE-JUICERS

The questions will still be flowing months from now: Did so many homes have to lose power? Is our grid as safe as it can be? Did the power have to stay off that long? But no one can doubt the hard work of the men and women, who reconnected Long Island post-Irene. LIPA owns the system, but National Grid, the British transmission conglomerate that bought Keyspan three years ago, maintains the island's power infrastructure. So it's local workers and an insta-army of out-of-state contractors who've been climbing the poles, riding the buckets and swearing day and night to get the power back on. Thank you for it. Keep at it, please, until the last 60-inch plasma is humming again. Email ellis@henican.com

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