Her neighbor Janine Soule, 40, chimed in: "Another thing that's bothering a lot of people is that we have no phones. I can't get in touch with my mom; I can't get in touch with anybody."

Ms. Napolitano accompanied Mr. Cuomo on a tour of Prattsville on Wednesday; the governor characterized the town as the hardest hit in the state.

In Easton, Conn., Lina Siciliano, 62, said the protracted loss of power, supplied by United Illuminating Company, was much more than an inconvenience.

"I don't know what to say, I'm so upset," said Ms. Siciliano, whose father and injured mother came to stay with her after losing power at their home in upstate New York. "I have two 84-year-old people in the house. All my insulin went bad. All the food in the refrigerator and freezer went bad."

Ms. Siciliano said she had called the utility six times. "I couldn't get through," she said. The municipal workers cutting trees opposite her house told her she might have to wait another four or five days. She said her patience would run out before then.

"People just didn't feel that the utility companies' actions matched what they had been told," United States Representative Joe Courtney said after surveying the damage in his district in eastern Connecticut. "The execution just wasn't there. That's pretty darn frustrating."

Mr. Courtney said he and Governor Malloy had just met with residents of several towns where most of the homes have not had their power restored. In North Stonington, which was completely dark, Mr. Courtney said they were told no repair crews had shown up yet.

Jeff Butler, the president of Connecticut Light and Power, said the company would have 1,200 crews on the job by Friday, 400 of them to clear trees and branches and 800 to repair fallen and tangled overhead lines. Most of those crews were called in from other states. Some crews came from as far away as British Columbia.

Securing enough help was complicated by the size of the storm, Mr. Courtney said. About 100 of the crews that the utility had requested from Quebec were en route to Connecticut when they were recalled to repair the damage that the storm did there, he explained.

Despite the scope of the restoration project it faced, the utility was no longer receiving a break from many of its customers by Wednesday afternoon. In the emergency operations center in Ridgefield, a town constable, Tom Belote, absorbed some residents' wrath. Even his wife had complained, he said, about the town's decision to cut off all power after the storm knocked out electricity to more than 90 percent of the homes on Sunday.

Mr. Belote's house was in one of the few neighborhoods that had been spared. But it too went dark after town officials agreed with the utility that it would be best to eliminate the risks of electrocution while crews worked to restore the power.

"After four days of answering phone calls from my neighbors, I can say a number of people were frustrated," Mr. Belote said. "For some of them, I tell them my tale of woe and it seems to work. For others, I just take the verbal abuse. I'm used to it."

Mr. Butler, the utility executive, did not assuage the rising ire when he said on Wednesday that the company would explore ways to recoup the costs of restoration from its customers. Utilities are allowed to do that, but given customers' anger, nobody was in the mood to consider that possibility.

Reporting was contributed by Sam Dolnick from Paterson, N.J.; Kristin Hussey and Robert Davey from Connecticut; Thomas Kaplan from New York; Noah Rosenberg from Prattsville, N.Y.; and Dirk Van Susteren from Calais, Vt.