Thousands in the Region Still Without Power

PECO said this morning that 8,000 customers are still in the dark without power three days after Hurricane Irene slammed into the Delaware Valley.

About 40 percent of the outages are in Delaware County, officials said. The rest are spread throughout Chester, Bucks and Montgomery counties, with a few scattered outages in Philadelphia. They hope to restore most of those customers today, but some may take until Thursday or Friday.

PECO says Irene one of the five worst storms of all-time. Since Saturday night, the utility company has restored service to 492,000 customers.

“We’re at the point in repairing storm damage now where will do the [four of five hours] of work and it will only restore 1, 2, or 3 customers,” said PECO spokeswoman Cathy Engel-Menendez.

She noted that the utility had to remove more trees in the suburbs than in Philadelphia. “Philadelphia tends to have more service underground than above ground so it would be less susceptible to damaged trees,” she said.