I just think that natural events affecting the access to electricity (et al) affects millions is occurring all over the world all the time, if people really want an item then they will somehow find a way to place a bid. If this is a precedent for you to extend an auction then you do open yourself up to be challenged by others in the future if missed out on a item because you did not extend the time limit due to an event that also affected their electricity and other services in a similar way to Sandy.
This off Wiki (and I have edited some events out):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_outages and these events
affected a minimum of one million people did you extend for these catastrophes?
2011On 2 February, in Texas, forced outages at two major coal-fired power plants and high electricity demand due to cold weather caused rotating blackouts affecting more than one million customers.
On 3 February, Cyclone Yasi hit communities in North Queensland, Australia. The cyclone with winds reaching up to 300 km/h (186mp/h) cause widespread damage through many communities. 170,000 homes lost electricity.
On 22 February at 12:51, a 6.3-magnitude earthquake struck the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, damaging large parts of Orion's sub-transmission and distribution network. Over 80 percent of the city (approximately 160,000 customers) lost power following the quake. A total of 82% of customers had their power restored in five days. Some central city areas are still without power as of 1 May.
On 27 April, one of America's most devastating tornado outbreaks knocked out power in most of northern Alabama, some 311 high tension truss towers were destroyed by multiple violent tornadoes.
Starting on 11 July, Cyprus suffered a half-week power outage, affecting all cities on Greek part of island. The outage was caused by an explosion next to the Vassilikos power plant, knocking out the plant.
On 23 July, failure of a glass insulator caused an outage of most of Northern Saskatchewan for about four hours.
On the morning of 11 July, the Chicagoland area was hit by a large derecho which knocked out power to over 850,000 according to ComEd.
On 27–28 August, Hurricane Irene caused over five million power outages.
On 8–9 September, widespread power outages affected parts of Southern California and Arizona, as well as parts of northwestern Mexico. Started by monitoring equipment that was causing problems at a power substation in southwest Arizona. Over five million people were affected.
In late October, a snowstorm along the East Coast of the USA caused over two million power outages. Some residents of Connecticut and western Massachusetts were without electricity for over seven days.
2012On 29 June, a line of thunderstorms with hurricane-force winds swept from Iowa to the Mid-Atlantic coast and knocked out power to more than 3.8 million people in Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Delaware, North Carolina, Kentucky, and metropolitan Washington, DC.
and so on
