Six-day blackout likely to continue

The damage to a utility’s underground network in the borough of Queens is greater than imagined – a twist in a six-day power outage that could mean electricity won’t be back until early in the week, the mayor said Saturday.

“It’ll be done when it’s done,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters gathered in Queens’ Astoria Park, where the city’s emergency command center for the blackout is set up.

Consolidated Edison CEO Kevin Burke apologized to customers for the inconvenience and attributed the outages to an unprecedented failure of multiple power lines.

To hasten the restoration of power to as many as 20,000 customers, or about 80,000 people, electrical crews from as far away as Pittsburgh and Columbus, Ohio, were on their way to New York to help, Bloomberg said.

Severe thunderstorms Friday hindered repair efforts and knocked out some fixed circuits, Bloomberg said.

Power has been out for many residents and businesses since Monday.

PHILADELPHIA

Boy Scout council subject to eviction

The city said it will evict a Boy Scout council from its publicly owned headquarters or make the group pay a fair rent price unless it changes its policy on gays.

The Boy Scouts’ Cradle of Liberty Council, the country’s third-largest, has been battling with the city for more than three years over the policy, which like the national Scouts organization forbids gays from being leaders.

City Solicitor Romulo L. Diaz Jr. wrote a letter to William T. Dwyer III, president of the Cradle of Liberty Council, stating that the council’s “discriminatory policies” violate city policy and law, and that city officials have not been assured the group will not discriminate.

Unless the city gets a “fair-market rent agreement,” the council will be evicted, the letter says.

The group has made its headquarters on a half-acre owned by the city in the upscale Philadelphia Art Museum area since 1928, when the city council voted to allow the Scouts to use the property rent-free “in perpetuity.” The Scouts pay for building upkeep.

The Boy Scouts of America’s policy on gay leaders was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2000.

DETROIT

Homeless man finds $21,000

A homeless man searching for returnable bottles in a trash bin found 31 U.S. savings bonds worth nearly $21,000 in a bag of clothes.

Charles Moore, 59, took the bonds to a 24-hour walk-in homeless shelter, where a staffer tracked down the family of the man whose name was on the bonds.

“They belong to him,” Moore told the Detroit News. “I did the right thing.”

Ernest Lehto’s family had given away many of his clothes shortly after his death in 2004.

How the bonds ended up in the trash bin is a mystery, but Lehto’s family left Moore a $100 reward.

“What a good Samaritan,” said Neil Lehto, who picked up the bonds Friday that had belonged to his late father.