When 34-year old Amaris Perez climbed out of the NYC Dumpster where she spent 20 minutes digging around for unspoiled food today, she realized that her feet were numb. "A lot of that stuff in there is frozen. This is the stuff that the store had to throw out I guess," she said, gesturing to the Key Food grocery on the corner of Avenue A and 4th Street.

Perez lives a few blocks south of the East Village grocery store and is one of 250,000 people in downtown Manhattan who has been without power since Hurricane Sandy hit on Monday. She was walking north with her 7-year-old twin daughters to use a pay phone today when she saw people digging around in a steel Dumpster.