By DAVID KLEPPER and MICHAEL HILL
Associated Press
WARWICK, R.I. – Cold showers. Meals in the dark. Refrigerators full of spoiled food. No TV. No Internet. Up and down the East Coast, patience is wearing thin among the hundreds of thousands of people still waiting for the electricity to come back on after Hurricane Irene knocked out the power last weekend.
“It’s like ‘Little House on the Prairie’ times,” said Debbie McWeeney, who went to a Red Cross shelter in Warwick to pick up food and water after everything in her refrigerator went bad. “Except I’m not enjoying it at all.”
With the waters receding across much of the flood-stricken region, homeowners are mucking out their basements and dragging soggy furniture to the curb. But the wait for power drags on, with an estimated 895,000 homes and businesses still without electricity, down from a peak of 9.6 million.