The majority of Lehigh Valley residents can expect their power to come back online by Saturday or Sunday, but New Jersey residents may be in the dark until Wednesday or later.
In Lehigh and Northampton counties, the majority of customers who lost power in Monday’s storm have had their power restored. But the number of customers in Warren and Hunterdon counties still sitting in the dark greatly outnumber those who've had their power restored.
“We continue to make progress … but we still have a lot of hard work ahead,” Dave Bonenberger, vice president of distribution operations for PPL Electric Utilities, said in a news release. “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 as hard as we can to get the lights back for everyone as soon as humanly possible.”
As of tonight, about 144,000 PPL customers were still without service, the majority in the Lehigh Valley and Pocono area, according to company spokesman Brian Hay. About 274,000 customers have had their power restored, and Hay said the goal is to have 85 percent of customers restored by the end of Friday.
As for the remaining customers, it is difficult to say when their power will be restored.
“There are a lot of difficult repair jobs out there, dangerous situations with trees tangled in wires,” Hay said.
The same was true for Met-Ed which has 77,000 customers without service while 193,000 have already been restored. Of those remaining, Met-Ed spokesman Scott Surgeoner said the company expects to have 95 percent restored by Saturday.
But the situation is more difficult for Jersey Central Power & Light, according to spokesman Chris Eck.
“Overall, system-wide, we’ve restored 370,000, but we have 830,000 out,” Eck said.
It is difficult for Eck to say when power will be restored, but he said JCP&L hopes to have the majority of customers restored by Wednesday, and full restoration seven days after that.
“We know customers are frustrated, and often times they’re not seeing line trucks in their area,” Eck said. “They want to see visible signs of progress.”
But Jersey Central workers are working from the substation out, repairing high voltage lines before low-voltage lines, he said.
The company website, JCP-L.com, includes a banner for a storm center and list of outages, where customers can see breakdowns of outages and expected renewal times.