massive fire in the queens neighborhood of new york. also known as breezy point. at least 50 houses have burned to the ground. look at these images. joining us on the telephone is new york city councilman eric olridge who represents breezy point in that area. thank you very much for joining us this hour. we know a couple hundred firefighters are battling this blaze right now. it looks out of control. is it? it absolutely is out of control. total devastation. there is no other word to describe it. just to think that an entire community in the city of new york could be devastated or wiped out like this by flood and fire in the same night is just unfathomable. gretchen: this community just to let our viewers know, was in the so-called zone a, which was the mandatory evacuation area. so you would presume that many people had left this area, although last hour you told us
houses. the various areas of new york are broken into zones, this is zone a aend this is the area largely evacuated and a flooded area, as well. right now 170 firefighters on the scene and don t know exactly what caused the fire but we ll keep an eye on that situation. in new york, meantime,en con ed which is the major power provided says more than 600,000 in the city and west chester county are in the dark. 250,000 in lower manhattan lost power when a transformer expl e exploded at a substation on 14th street. bob, i know how busy you are. are these the most updated numbers? the most updated is 660,000 across the system that s the five boroughs and west chester and of that we ve got 160,000
situation? there were a number there are a number of health care facilities and in consultation with the health care facilities not to evacuate them to begin a number of days ago discharging patients who were healthy enough to be discharged, moving patients on ventilators to other facilities in case, god forbid, something like this happened. so we really tried to reduce the number of people and take those who couldn t get off out. we believe most we believe the facility had excessive backup generators, et cetera. for whatever reason, that has become a problem at nyu so in an orderly fashion the patients are being moved to different facilities. in irene we moved patients from zone a to zone b and zone b to
stephanie, we hear some companies are delays publishing their quarterly reports. explain what s behind that. a number of companies simply hold off. why? everyone is not back in their seats with their pencils in hand. the market needs a bit of time to digest all of this. hate to note it, but think about what you ve been through in the last few years. so many professional investors lived and worked through the ramifications of september 11th and came back into the markets. those who run these organizations, whether it s corporate america or whether banks are saying, let s get everybody safe and back on their feet and in their seats. this is not about what s the next trade and where do i make money next. many of these banks were all located or are located in zone a and mandatory evacuation zones. these banks simply said we do not need any nonessential employees in our organizations until we know they re okay.
million new yorkers as his responsibility, but he also keeps the peace and safety of the world capital, the city that never sleeps. i welcome right now the police commissioner of new york, raymond kelly. remember, commish. great to be with you always. geraldo: so, what, what a storm. you know, the evaluation, first of all, tell us how that went and how people responded. well, it s still ongoing, no question about it. there s potentially 375,000 people in the, what we call zone a for evacuation area in new york, so it s ongoing and we understand that everybody is not going to evacuate. we d like everybody to do that, but some people are going to remain behind. and we ask people to use common sense. this is a going to be a tremendous one and the side and breadth we haven t seen for many, many years. geraldo: do you worry that people living through irene with so little damage here in