Thousands Still Without Power Days After Blizzard Slammed Chicago Area
CHICAGO (CBS) -- More than two days after a blizzard hit the Chicago area, about 6,100 homes and businesses are still without power.
ComEd said nearly 350,000 customers lost power in the winter storm Sunday night and Monday morning. While the vast majority of those outages have been fixed, several northwest suburbs still have hundreds of homes and businesses waiting for repairs.
As of 11:30 a.m., about 6,100 ComEd customers were still without power due to the storm.
More than 500 of those outages are in Des Plaines. The northwest suburbs took the brunt of the damage from the storm, leaving thousands of homes without power or heat for three nights in a row.
The temperature inside Matt Nowogurski's house has been hovering around 46 degrees since the storm. That's why he's left a faucet dripping as he toughs it out at home.
"Not fun, but we're hanging in there," he said.
The tree in his back yard and others like it nearby were taken out by Sunday night's blizzard. When they went down, they took out power lines feeding dozens of homes in the neighborhood.
Nowogurski said he's never seen anything like it in the 28 years he's lived there.
The Nowogurskis are better off than quite a few of their neighbors, because they have a generator to run a space heater, and keep one room in the house warm so they don't have to go to a hotel.
"This is what's saving me. At least I've got something," he said.
Outside Marina Gomez's home, a large downed wire was still live on Wednesday, so ComEd has stationed a worker nearby to make sure no one gets hurt.
That only added to the frustration for people like Gomez, who could see a utility worker on the block, but couldn't see repair crews working to restore power the past couple days.
"It's horrible. It's freezing. I've been calling ComEd. They won't tell you anything. They just say you have to wait, wait, wait," Gomez said.
Repair crews finally arrived in the neighborhood on Wednesday.
"Now they're here. What a coincidence," Gomez said.
ComEd said crews have been focusing on the areas with the most outages first.
With nearly 350,000 homes and businesses losing power in the storm, ComEd called in help from utility companies in neighboring states to help with repairs. A total of about 1,000 crews have been working around the clock to restore power.