Ten days after Hurricane Sandy, about 750,000 in N.Y., N.J. still without electricity

Farmingdale, N.Y. - Vincent Pina finally saw a couple of utility trucks coming down his street Thursday and started to wave in anticipation. But they just cruised past and kept on going.

He hung his head in resignation.

"The thing that gets me the most is that there is no flood damage. I don't have any branches down. I have no wires down," said the Long Islander, who put a hand-painted sign out front that read: "Still No Power."

So why, he wondered, was it taking so long to get electricity?

A week and a half after Superstorm Sandy slammed the coast and inflicted tens of billions of dollars in damage, hundreds of thousands of customers in New York and New Jersey are still waiting for the electricity to come back on, and lots of cold and tired people are losing patience. Some are demanding investigations of utilities they say aren't working fast enough.

An angry New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo joined the calls for an investigation Thursday, ripping the utilities as unprepared and badly managed.

"Privately I have used language my daughters couldn't hear," he fumed. He added: "It's unacceptable the longer it goes on because the longer it goes on, people's suffering is worse."

The power companies have said they are dealing with damage unprecedented in its scope and doing the best they can. And there is no denying the magnitude of what they have done: At the peak, more than 8.5 million homes and businesses across 21 states lost power. As of Thursday, that was down to about 750,000, almost entirely in New York and New Jersey.

That's after a nor'easter overnight knocked out power to 200,000 more in New York and New Jersey, erasing some of the progress.

The mounting criticism came as New York City and Long Island followed New Jersey's lead and announced odd-even gasoline rationing to deal with fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations; the Federal Emergency Management Agency started bringing mobile homes into the region; and Cuomo said the storm could cost New York State alone $33 billion.

New Jersey did not have a damage estimate of its own, but others have put Sandy's overall toll at up to $50 billion, making it the second most expensive storm in U.S. history, behind Hurricane Katrina, which swamped New Orleans in 2005.

Sandy killed more than 100 people in 10 states, with most of the dead in New York and New Jersey.

The power industry's defenders have pointed out that Sandy was huge and hit the nation's most densely populated corridor. By the Energy Department's reckoning, it left more people in the dark than any other storm in U.S. history.

It did more than knock down power lines; it flooded switching stations and substations, forcing workers to take apart hundreds of intricate components, clean them, replace some of them, rewire others and put it all back together. Only after these stations are re-energized can workers go out and repair lines.

Around the region, though, customers were complaining that they were being left in the dark about when power would be restored.

New York's Democratic governor blasted the utilities as "nameless, faceless" monopolies that weren't up to the job. "The management has failed the consumers. It is just that simple," he said.

Cuomo appears to be alone among the area's big three politicians. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg defended Con Ed and said it has done a good job in recent years. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie praised the utilities, saying he expects all in his state to have power by early Sunday - 400,000 outages remained there on Thursday.

"The villain in this case is Hurricane Sandy," Christie said.