Crews race to restore power in Chicago area following snowstorm
CHICAGO (CBS) -- It's a race to restore remaining power outages as tempeartures continue to plummet in the Chicago area. At the height of the outages ComEd had roughly 137,000 customers without power.
By 4 p.m. Saturday there were only small pockets of outages--about 20 customers in total.
In River Grove crews were high in the air, using their cherry pickers to take equipment out and replace it with new parts. The problem there affected fewer than five customers.
ComEd said the problem started as early as 8:50 a.m. Friday.
A ComEd spokesperson told CBS 2 all the crews they have are local and most are employed by ComEd.
They knew outages would be a problem with the kind of wet, heavy precipiation the area got.
"It's always our goal to make sure that our customers have reliable energy. And when a storm like this comes through, you know, it's that wet, heavy snow. It brought branches and trees down on lines. And it created a real mess," said spokesman John Schoen.
Schoen says there is a chance there could be a handful of customers who would not have their power on by 6 p.m. Saturday. With the temperatures as low as they're going to be, he says people who leave their homes to find a warmer spot can sign up for ComEd text updates abour restoration.