Lehigh Valley and northwest New Jersey had about 900 out of power at 1 this afternoon - UPDATE

Damage in the Slate Belt is worse than expected and power could remain out until Thursday, a spokesman said.

Even though the sun is up, nearly 900 customers remain in the dark early this afternoon in the Lehigh Valley and northwest New Jersey, according to power company websites.

Dangerous thunderstorms roared Tuesday night through the region, downing trees and knocking out power.

Hunterdon County's outage number, which a spokesman said might have been inflated by a substation outage in Morris County, dropped from 1,007 to 71 between 9 and 11 a.m., according to a power company outage map. By 1 this afternoon, it was down to five.

But damage in the Slate Belt is worse than expected and could take until Thursday to fix, a power company spokesman said.

Led by customers out in Emmaus, Salisbury Township and South Whitehall Township, about 1 this afternoon PPL still had to restore power to 634 customers in Lehigh County. PPL also had 94 powerless in Northampton County.

PPL had by 7:15 this morning restored power to 1,164 customers in Lehigh County and 226 in Northampton County since the storm began, spokeswoman Martha Herron said .

Trees coming down and wind were the two leading causes of the outages, she said. The top wind gust measured at Lehigh Valley International Airport was 41 mph at 6:13 p.m., according to the National Weather Service in Mount Holly, N.J.

Met-Ed had 107 customers out at 1 o'clock in Northampton County, paced by Bangor  at 42.

Met-Ed spokesman Marc Troutman said power in the Slate Belt could be out into Thursday as six power poles were down in Bangor, he said. It was going to require an "extensive rebuild" to get all the customers back on line, he said.

Most other customers in the county will have power between noon and 4 this afternoon, he said.

As many as 1,200 customers lost power in the storm, he said.

The utility did not bring in outside workers to do repairs, he said. The difficulty of this storm was the damage was spread out over a large area, he said before learning of the extent of the damage in the Slate Belt.

About 42 JCP&L customers were powerless in Warren County.

JCP&L's challenge today is fixing individual outages, spokesman Stan Prater said. October's snowstorm, which took out numerous tress, and the utility's aggressive tree-trimming program could have made Tuesday's damage less severe, he said.

You can keep up with PPL and Met-Ed/JCP&L by clicking on your region on the linked outage sites.

We'll update as the day goes on.

Today's AccuWeather forecast indicates thunderstorms are still possible, but after a high in the mid-80s, the next several days will feature high temperatures in the 70s.