Gov. Christie Says Utilities Working To Restore Power Across NJ
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -Many Delaware Valley residents were still without electricity on Monday, following that freak October snowstorm Saturday night that brought down trees and power lines.
New Jersey governor Chris Christie held a news conference this morning to address the outage situation there. At the peak, he said, three-quarters of a million customers had lost power.
As of Monday morning more than 400,000 customers were still offline, most of them in the northern and central counties.
He said the utilities were bringing in extra crews from out of state, and have assured him that 95 percent will have their power restored by Thursday.
"I know that if you are without power today, Thursday seems like a long time from now," Christie said, "which is why we're working to give utility companies additional resources to get this situation resolved as quickly as possible considering the challenge."
He says the fact that trees were still "leafed out" resulted in more outages all over the northern part of the state.
Here is an power outage update as of Monday morning.
PECO Energy still had around 20,000 customers without power, most being in Bucks and Chester Counties. PECO said they hoped to have the vast majority of outages repaired by the end of today.
By 3:30pm the number of outages was down to 15,000.
Atlantic City Electric had around 3,000 customers without power throughout their Garden State coverage area.
PSE&G had 145,000 outages remaining, all of them in the northern end of New Jersey, as of 9am. There were no outages in their southern service area of New Jersey, which includes Camden and Burlington counties.
PPL reports that its crews had about 1,626 outages in Montgomery County and 10,627 outages in Bucks County as of 9am.
Due to a power outage, Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa. was closed on Monday. Only essential services staff were asked to report.
Reported by Molly Daly and Al Novack, KYW Newsradio 1060
