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More than 770,000 homes and businesses were still without power Thursday morning after snow and ice storms on January 27-28 left more than 1.3 million customers in the dark from Oklahoma to Pennsylvania, local utilities reported. The storms hit Kentucky the hardest, leaving more than half a million customers without power in the Bluegrass State. Officials at E.ON U.S., which owns Louisville Gas and Electric Co and Kentucky Utilities Co, said it could take up to two weeks to restore service to all 381,000 affected customers.
E.ON U.S., a subsidiary or German energy company E.ON AG, owns and operates about 8,000 megawatts of generating capacity and transmits and distributes electricity to more than 900,000 customers and natural gas to more than 325,000 customers in Kentucky. High temperatures in Louisville, the biggest city in Kentucky, will remain below normal in the 30s F through Saturday, according to forecasts by AccuWeather.com. After crashing across the Midwest, the storm system dropped a lot of snow in the Northeast before moving off the East Coast into the Atlantic Ocean late Wednesday. Snow, however, does not disrupt power service like ice. Ice accumulates on trees and branches, snapping them onto power lines. In Arkansas, another hard hit state, the electric cooperatives, which serve about 490,000 customers, said outages peaked at about 300,000. The co-ops spent Wednesday assessing damage and restoring power but there were still about 189,000 homes and businesses in the dark Wednesday afternoon. |
