All of Long Island was suffering in last week's record heat, and many lost electricity, as a surge in air-conditioning use pushed the power supply to its limit. The crisis was certainly felt in Farmingdale, where one neighborhood was without power for a total of 37 hours.

With temperatures in the triple-digits, the lights went out in a group of about a dozen homes on Alexander Avenue on Monday, July 5, at 7:40 p.m. And, unlike surrounding neighborhoods, whose power was restored within an hour and a half, the block of residents had to sweat out the night without electricity. Power was restored at 1:30 p.m. the next day, but by 8 p.m. was out again. Alexander Avenue residents spent another sweltering night without relief, or stayed with relatives or in hotels until the lights went back on at about 4 p.m on Wednesday, July 7.

To make matters worse, the residents were frightened about leaving their windows open as they tried to sleep in the hot, humid conditions, because two homes on the block had been burglarized in the middle of the night just days before.

"You want air to come. You want to breathe. But you're worried," said resident Deborah Toth, recalling the ordeal. "There are no words to describe how hot it was that first night. You just felt like you were on fire, like you were burning."

Toth added that the night was also difficult for her two children, ages 9 and 11. "I was putting cold water and towels on their faces to cool them down - and on my face - you just felt your temperature rising and rising," she said.

In addition to being without air conditioning or even a fan, the residents did not have hot water, according to Toth. Her neighbor, Frances Cosby, said she had to dispose of the entire contents of her refrigerator, costing her hundreds of dollars.

The root of Alexander Avenue's electric problem lay in an old transformer which was not strong enough to handle the block's usage. When power was first restored on Tuesday, it was only temporary because a replacement for the old transformer was needed. A new transformer was finally installed on Wednesday.

Both Toth and Cosby criticized the Long Island Power Authority's (LIPA) handling of the two-day ordeal, noting that they felt their repeated phone calls to the utility were being ignored.They also felt that LIPA should have better prepared for the trouble the forecast heat wave would cause. "You know it's July. Why are you not prepared?" Cosby offered.

But the process of restoring power was complex, and preparation for the heat wave was nearly impossible, according to Michael Lowndes, manager of media relations for LIPA. "Not the majority thank goodness, but a number of people did experience a long, protracted outage," he said, adding that at the peak of the crisis LIPA crews had 50 thousand outages to contend with. "It's not a matter of people being overlooked, or anything quite like that. It's the difficulty of sometimes restoring certain individuals."

Lowndes added, "Yeah, in a sense there are things that you can do to prepare for it. You can strengthen the system. You can do all sorts of things to make the system less vulnerable. But do you know what, those things cost huge amounts of money. And of course, now you're talking about boosting rates, and that's something we really don't want to do."

For that reason, encouraging conservation was seen as a more realistic way of dealing with the crisis as LIPA crews scrambled to repair the power supply. At LIPA's request, county and local governments, as well as some large businesses closed their offices early on Tuesday. According to Lowndes, that effort alone saved almost 100 megawatts of energy, and likely prevented thousands of other customers from being knocked off line.

He added that throughout the crisis, less than 10 percent of all the LIPA customers were affected. "More than 90 percent of the customers here on Long Island, who were in the midst of a heat wave as well, did not suffer an outage."

According to Robert Stricoff, of the Town of Babylon Department of Citizen Services, the outage experienced on Alexander Avenue was among the worst three in the entire township.

In response to an appeal from residents, he, along with Town Supervisor Richard Schaeffer, had requested that LIPA expedite the restoration of power on Alexander Avenue, particularly because of the fear instilled by the recent burglaries on the block. "We had one or two locations in West Babylon that were out just as long as Alexander was, but Alexander had some extenuating circumstances," he said.

For the residents of Alexander Avenue, last week's heat wave and power outages on Long Island surely hit home, and will not easily be forgotten.