NEW YORK (AP) – Queens businesses face losses far in excess of the $7,000 in assistance offered by Con Edison in the wake of the recent 10-day blackout, U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney said Sunday.

“Astoria businesses got their power back, but they’re still waiting for fair compensation for their losses,” Maloney said. “Con Ed’s aging and unreliable power grid caused this mess and they need to offer much more help to businesses devastated by the blackout.”

Maloney, a Democrat who represents the Upper East Side of Manhattan and portions of Queens, said her staff surveyed businesses affected by the blackout and found that some reported losses of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Con Ed spokesman Chris Olert said the $7,000 limit on reimbursements for commercial customers was set by an arrangement between the utility and the state Public Service Commission. He said that as of Sunday, Con Ed had mailed out more than 1,500 checks for more than $884,000 to commercial and residential customers hit by the blackout.

The outage affected as many as 100,000 people in Northwest Queens. Power was restored to all but a handful of Queens homes by Wednesday, but thousands of Staten Islanders suffered blackouts caused by rainstorms Thursday and Friday.

City Council hearings on the blackout are scheduled for Monday, while a state Assembly hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

Maloney, who held a news conference on the subject in front of Titan Foods, a grocery store affected by the Queens blackout, also renewed her calls for federal hearings on the causes of the power outage and for the federal government to declare a disaster area in western Queens.

Also on Sunday, U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer said the federal Department of Energy should assess weaknesses in the nation’s power grid following major blackouts in St. Louis and parts of California and Arkansas as well as New York.

“Now that the power has been restored to we cannot just go on our merry way,” said Schumer, a New York Democrat. “We need to find out what went wrong, where it went wrong, and fix it.”

He called for a federal investigation into the outages and a full audit of the power grid by the Federal Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability, a unit of the Department of Energy.

Olert said Con Ed would deliver a report on the Queens blackout to Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday. He said the cause of the outage was still being analyzed.

The utility took out a full-page ad in several newspapers on Sunday promising to find out what caused the blackout and to repair and improve its damaged infrastructure.

“While you endured, Con Edison worked hard to restore service, and we will strive to restore your trust and confidence in us,” CEO Kevin Burke said.

With temperatures in the mid-90s forecast for the coming week, Olert said Con Ed expects there may be record use of electricity.

The utility is asking customers to conserve energy through measures including turning off air conditioners when no one is home and using ovens, dishwashers and washing machines in the cooler early morning and evening hours.