NORTH KINGSTOWN -- When Patricia Mullane lost power yesterday, she took a cold shower. It didn't help.

Her face turned red and she had trouble breathing.

The 54-year-old diabetic says she's been without power, off and on, for more than three weeks, but the last two days have been the worst, she said. None of the air conditioners in her West Allenton Road home were working after noon.

"It's getting so much worse," said Mullane, who works in Wakefield as a private nurse. "I was dehydrated. I'm on six medications and my husband is on seven."

Her neighbors, on nearby Lawnwood Road, found other ways to cope.

"I stayed in the backyard pool until the power came on," said Robert Bagley, who also lost electricity three times on Wednesday, when temperatures hovered around 100.

Down the street, Jayson Richard came home to a gray ranch house with no power, after delivering cabinets to customers. He couldn't use his air conditioner or a fan. "These houses get hot quickly -- in about two minutes," he said. "It's hard to work outside all day and come home to this heat."

Mullane, Bagley and Richard were among 3,700 people in North Kingstown who lost power for an hour or more yesterday, many of them around 12:30 p.m. Only Coventry reported a greater number of customers without power -- 6,000.

National Grid spokesman David Graves blamed the loss on the failure of a Warwick substation, which feeds large amounts of electricity to South County. Lightning struck the station Wednesday night, he said. And yesterday, two smaller stations that service the area failed briefly, although most had power by 3 p.m. he said.

But Mullane, Bagley and Richard also live in the southern end of town, where new-home construction has outstripped the company's ability to service the area, Graves said.

As a result, National Grid is seeking state and town approval to build a substation at the intersection of Tower Hill and Shermantown roads. The North Kingstown Zoning Board of Review will consider the request this month.

In May, National Grid engineer Melissa Scott told town officials that peak electricity use in the area will increase by nearly 20 percent in the next six years. Without a new substation, customers could experience low voltage, overloading and rolling blackouts, she said.

"There have been outages in that area, and it's unacceptable to us and unacceptable to the customer," Graves said.

The town already has two substations, but it's "not enough to serve all the customers during peak demand," he said. In addition, severe storms, heat and demand have caused power failures in the past three weeks. "These have been abnormally hot days," Graves said.

Not everyone wants to see the substation built at the intersection. Last year, residents from the Tower Hill area opposed the site.

"We, in no way, dispute the need for power," said Julie Maloney, on Pinecrest Drive. But the proposed site is in a residential area and, if approved, "would set a bad precedent," she said.

Even if the company wins permission to build a new substation, construction won't start until spring.

That's bad news for residents like Linda Grueb, who lost electricity Wednesday night. It was so hot upstairs her children slept on a mattress on the floor of the living room, she said.

When Grueb came home yesterday, the digital clocks on her appliances were all flashing.

"It's getting to be a real habit," she said.

On the same street, resident Beverly Garman expressed similar frustration.

"We just put in central air three weeks ago," Garman said. "But in the past three weeks, we've lost power five times."

pdavis@projo.com / (401) 277-7093