Met-Ed was to start its work at 3 o'clock this morning while PPL aimed for 7 o'clock. But with the eye moving past, the back side of the storm could scuttle efforts.
Met-Ed, weather permitting, was to begin at 3 o'clock this morning to restore power to the 55,449 of its customers without electricity in Northampton County, according to the Northampton County Emergency Operations Center in Upper Nazareth Township.
PPL hopes to begin its restoration effort -- once again, weather-permitting -- at 7 o'clock in Northampton County, the operations center reports. The Allentown utility has 60,134 without power in Northampton County and 117,908 in Lehigh County.
Bethlehem, in both counties, has a total of 29,795 in the dark, while the Easton area is the center of outages in the eastern part of the county, according to power company figures. Bethlehem Township, Pa., has 10,681 customers in the dark. As an example of how difficult the task has been, only 30 customers have been restored in Bethlehem, and none of them are in Lehigh County.
Easton had 8,669 customers out, while Palmer Township had 8,234, Forks Township had 5,776 and Wilson Borough had 3,325, power company figures indicate.
Allentown, as might be expected, had the most outages in the region with 31,254, with only 41 restored since the storm began, according to PPL figures.
In total, there are 333,998 customers without power at 3:15 this morning in Northampton, Lehigh, Hunterdon and Warren counties, according to power company figures. The number could rise as people wake up in a few hours.
With the eye of Superstorm Sandy early this morning over the Lehigh Valley, winds slowed to 5 to 10 miles per hours, but power restoration efforts could be delayed again on the back side of the storm with sustained winds of 15 to 20 mph and gusts up to 30 along with showers, the National Weather Service says. The eye was moving toward central Pennsylvania at 4:30. The weather will be more conducive for line work this afternoon, a meteorologist said.
In Warren County, JCP&L reports 55,449 customers out, with 5,978 of them in Phillipsburg. Readington Township (6,370) and Raritan Township (6,673) led the way in Hunterdon County, which had 52,261 customers out. The Hunterdon Department of Public Safety points out there are only about 59,000 electric customers in the county, so nearly 90 percent of dwellings don't have power this morning.
While the storm ripped through the region in recent hours, the power companies did other sorts of restorations that didn't require linemen in bucket trucks, the emergency operations center reported.
As of 3:20 this morning, the emergency operations center had no reports of storm-related injuries.
Find outages in your area:
Check here for a map of outages in Northampton and Bucks counties from Met-Ed.
Check here for a listing of outages in Lehigh and Northampton counties from PPL.
Check here for a map of New Jersey outages from JCP&L.