we go to bob mcgee from con edison. mr. mcgee, what is the state of the power supply in new york city now? >> the explosion that your your viewers ew probably looking at, i can't see it, i imagine it's one that i've seen, essentially wound up taking out power south of 39th street in new york city. there had been a couple of networks that had been taken out before in lower manhattan. the battery park network and the fullton network and that affected to that point, about 6500 customers in lower manhattan. at the time that this incident occurred we had about 225,000 people out system-wide. this event took out a number of additional networks which resulted in power outages in lower manhattan, at least, 250,000 people. we've gotten some of those folks back. they're at about 225,000 out right now in manhattan. elsewhere around the system, there's substantial outages in west chester. we've got almost 150,000 people out in westchester and a total of 605,000 people out in the five burroughs of new york city and westchester. >> to go

bob mcgee is on the phone. hello, sir. that was quite a display we saw. the explosion at the 14th street facility. >> very mad. it is the facility where the power comes in their. >> there was a lot of debris because that spectacular explosion. it wound up knocking out power to about 250,000 people at the time. >> so this is what you can account for? >> when the event occurred in the lights went out -- we believe that the two are very definitely interrelated. >> here is what we don't understand. we had a representative on the show and they said it was at a steam state facility. >> pristine facilities are excellent. it had been shut down earlier because of the floodwaters. along with the two shutdowns around battery park area and substations there. >> deliberate shutdowns. bob, before it gets out, is everyone below 40th street in the dark? is that still the case? is that a result of some failure? >> south of 39th street on the east side and on the westside, it should be south of 31st street with the exception of a sliver of area at the very southwest part.

. >> con ed spokesman bob mcgee talking about 660,000 in the dark in new york city and westchester county. part of the 7.1 million across this wide swath of this monster storm. we've also been watching the devastating pictures coming to us from queens and this huge fire that is raging there. let me bring in nbc meteorologist bill karins and the first thing that comes to mind is obviously the terrible conditions that these 170 firefighters must be facing as they're trying to put out this fire, bill. >> scary situation, chris. i first saw a lot of tweets on it about this on twitter and i'm afraid of what lives may have been in the way of this fire. because this was an evacuation area but on twitter there was a couple of people in these homes that were trying to figure out what to do, where to go, how to take their children out of harm's way and it's a very narrow ribbon. i was probably at the beach in this area about three or four weeks ago, right around 130th beach street. it's a very narrow ribbon out on the rockaway, not a lot of room on either side. one side is the ocean, the other is t

channels me and bob by mcgee. one night with janis joplin. >> another edition of chaz my take. -- that's my take. >> and now, that's my take with wttg vice president and general manager. >> what would you do if you had a billion dollars? buy an island? or an nfl franchise. what if you decided to give back to your community? maybe you'd build a new wing or two for a hospital. support the arts by giving to the kennedy center or build communities for low income earners. if you are bill conway, a dc based asset management firm, you take a different path. after a thoughtful process, mr. conway has decided to make a round of grants totalling $55 million of a $1 billion donation to help the washington region by addressing the route of the problem facing low income people. job training that keeps them from building independent lives for themselves and families. provide $30 million worth of scholarships and tuition to people enrolled in nursing programs. the focus on nursing is not arbitrary. being the successful businessm