At a press conference in Queens, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called the discrepancy annoying, and said that Con Edison apparently based its earlier count on the number of customers who complained to the utility company that they had no power, and not on any systematic assessment of the power outage.

“I think what is annoying is that their first estimate was done based on phone calls,” the mayor said, saying he should have directed them earlier just to drive around the area to get an actual count of the number of people whose power was out.

. . .

The mayor said that he suspected on Thursday that the utility company’s estimate of 2,000 customers without power — a ‘customer’ could be one person or one building with many residents — was probably low.

“They cannot tell from their computers,” Mr. Bloomberg said on a radio call-in program earlier today. “Their estimates at the beginning were based on how many people called up and said, ‘My power’s not working.’ You can question whether that’s an intelligent way to do it.”

The only way to tell, he said, would be to actually see which buildings had no power, he said, so on Thursday, he “demanded that they take a look, and they drove down almost every street.”

“It got so late that, apparently, at that point, they said, ‘Well, everybody’s gone to bed, you don’t know whether people have power, you can’t tell from looking,’ and they tried to actually look,” he said.

“If it was one house in a block that didn’t have lights on, you assumed that there’s power there because typically everybody in that block would be out, or nobody,” he said. “If all of the block is dark, they assume that all of those people are without power.”

Helen Calthorpe, 52, found out later that she had been caught in a police sting known as “Lucky Bag” that has been in operation in the subway system since February. The operation involves police putting a shopping bag or backpack on a subway bench and arresting anyone who picks it up for petit larceny and possession of stolen property.

Calthorpe, who lives on Grand St. in Soho, pleaded not guilty on July 14 and is due to appear in Criminal Court at 100 Centre St. on Sept. 18.

Civil rights advocates claim that “Lucky Bag” is a form of entrapment. But police have said it has resulted in the arrest of many repeat offenders.

Calthorpe, an actress who was going to her day job at about 1 p.m. on that day, saw the Verizon shopping bag, looked in and saw a box for a cell phone and an iPod beside it and picked up the bag. She was immediately surrounded by four police officers, one in uniform and the others in plainclothes.

“They kept asking, ‘Where are you going with that bag?’ and put me in handcuffs with my hands behind me,” Calthorpe said in an interview last week during which she insisted she had never been arrested before and was victimized by police.

She recalled that she had been in a hurry to get to her job and intended to look into the bag later to see if there was a receipt with an address of the person who lost it.

Federal officials are concerned that city water now contains too much clay, stirred up in part by wild weather upstate, where most of the reservoirs are. The city has been dumping tons of sediment-scrubbing chemicals in the water, but that may not be enough. The city may have to build a filtration plant.

That could cost billions of dollars, a financial headache, perhaps. But a culinary one?

Some restaurateurs said that if water is the most important taste element in your cooking, you have a problem.

“I have another store in New Jersey in a town that filters the water,” said Louis Thompson, who owns Terrace Bagels, on Prospect Park West in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. “My bagel comes out just as good in New Jersey as it does in New York.”

The wrong water can ruin things, he said. “You can’t use well water to make bagels,” he said. “You could, but they won’t come out right. What, exactly is in that water, I don’t know. I’m not a chemist, I’m just a bagel maker. All I can tell is the water in New York has always been good for bagels, Italian bread, pastries.”

Noel Labat-Comess, the president of Tom Cat Bakery, a wholesale operation in Long Island City, Queens, called the issue of filtration and taste a “nonworry.”

“Water used for bread that’s within a normal range has little or no effect on it,” he said. “It’s only when it gets to the extremes, when it gets extremely mineraly, that it can be a problem. I’ve never run into anyone in my years of baking anywhere that had a problem with their bread that was caused by the water.”

. . .

Mr. Thompson, of Terrace Bagels, experimented before he opened his New Jersey shop and cafe. He hauled 150 gallons of filtered New Jersey water to Brooklyn and made a batch of bagels.

. . .

Nowhere was the “so close, yet so far” sentiment more pronounced as at the Yellowbird Repair Shop, directly across 20th Avenue from the Charles Poletti Power Plant in Astoria. Despite its proximity to the plant’s electric turbines, the repair shop, like thousands of homes and businesses in western Queens, remained largely without power yesterday.

“All they have to do is run an extension cord out to us and we’re open for business,” said Chris Kalatzis, the shop manager, adding that his house in Astoria was also without power, ruining $200 worth of food in his refrigerator.

. . .

In Queens, the system began to fail on Monday, the third day of a severe heat wave, and the failures were probably worsened by thunderstorms on Tuesday night.

In parts of Long Island City, Sunnyside, Woodside and other areas, there was substantial loss of food, loss of business and loss of cool. “Even third-world countries do not have this kind of problem,” said Jimmy Istavrof, 57, who owns the J & T Greek and Italian Deli on Ditmars Boulevard. “All this from a couple of 90-degree days.”

He showed how his Greek desserts and other foods sat spoiling in his freezers.

“It stinks,” said Nilsa Feliciano, 44, at the Flushing Ave. stop, adding that riders run from the trains “to get fresh air.”

“It smells like a thousand bums are living down there,” said straphanger Brian Colas, 18.

“We put air fresheners in [the booth] to keep the smell out,” said Flushing Ave. token booth clerk Darlene McDuffie, who avoids venturing out into the station.

City Department of Environmental Protection officials blamed the stench on a breach in a 54-inch-wide sewer pipe that runs parallel to the train tracks between the stations.

But in two weeks of looking, including with a remote camera, DEP has been unable to pinpoint the source of the leak.

“We’ve not been able to determine exactly where the leak is,” said agency spokeswoman Natalie Millner.

Workers were sent into the pipe yesterday in an effort to locate the damage, she said.

Despite the leak, the pipeline, which carries household wastes and rain water to the Newtown Creek-Greenpoint Sewage Treatment Plant, is operating properly, Millner said.

“We’re aware of it. We’re doing our best to find the source and fix it,” Millner said.

Even so, Transit Authority officials, who said track workers reported the problem several weeks ago, said the DEP hasn’t acted quickly enough.