Met-Ed restores 13,000 in Northampton County, while PPL returns 30,000 in Lehigh County and 13,000 in Northampton County. Warren County improves by 9,000 while JCP&L has Hunterdon 5,000 to the better.
Progress is measurable in the last 24 hours as power companies are returning power to residents of Northampton, Lehigh, Hunterdon and Warren counties two days after Superstorm Sandy's eye left the region.
PPL said Wednesday it would have most power restored by Friday and Met-Ed listed the weekend as the time 95 percent of customers would be out of the dark. The challenge was greater for JCP&L on the New Jersey side, with outages expected to last into next week, but numbers were better there this morning as well.
In total, the four-county region has 217,216 power company customers without electricity this morning, down from 288,000 on Tuesday morning and 330,000 on Monday night, according to the utilities' outage sites.
As of about 6:30 this morning, Met-Ed had 34,402 customers out in Northampton County, down from 47,712 about 24 hours earlier. Still hard hit were Easton (5,854 out, down from 7,276 on Tuesday), Palmer Township (4,681, down from 6,049) and Upper Mount Bethel Township (2,887, down from 3,076). The entire Slate Belt was smacked and much of it remained without power late Tuesday.
Met-Ed 's customers in Lehigh County are getting little relief, with 3,855 still out, down only 200 from a day before.
PPL has show the most significant improvement, going from 102,145 customers without power Tuesday in Lehigh County to 69,453 today. Allentown still has 21,072 out, down from 24,897. South Whitehall Township went from 12,829 to 6,820. Upper Saucon Township this morning is at 5,789, down from 8,673. And Lower Macungie Township is much improved, going from 7,077 to 2,810.
In Bethlehem, the 6:30 figure was 19,231 out in both counties, down from 25,258 a day before.
In Northampton County, PPL had 32,158 customers powerless, down from 45,125. In Bethlehem Township, Pa., the number is 3,261, down from 7,456. More than 9,700 people have had power restored in the township since the storm began, PPL reports.
“We continue to make progress, and the more than 5,000 people supporting the restoration effort — including more than 3,000 workers in the field — have started to turn the tide,” Dave Bonenberger, vice president of Distribution Operations for PPL Electric Utilities, said in a news release.
“But we still have a lot of hard work ahead. Right now, we have more workers out there making repairs than in any previous storm. It is time-consuming, labor-intensive work. We’re working around the clock and as hard as we can to get the lights back for everyone as soon as humanly possible. We still expect to have 80 to 85 percent of affected customers back in service by Friday night.”
JCP&L made some progress in Warren County, going from 41,392 to 32,511 in 24 hours. Phillipsburg still had 3,965 out, while Mansfield Township was little changed at 3,553. In Hunterdon County, the overall number improved from 50,505 to 44,837, but in hard-hit communities such as Raritan (5,053, down from 5,516) and Readington (5,607 down from 5,624) townships, progress was slow.
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.