Almost everyone who lost power a week ago during a wave of severe storms has had power restored.
Almost.
Duquesne Light, the biggest power supplier to Allegheny and Beaver counties, said a “small subset” of households still were in the dark but should have their electric service restored Wednesday.
The company had estimated that some customers would be without power for up to seven days.
More than half a million customers throughout the region were affected by power outages caused by severe storms that began April 29.
Duquesne Light was hit the hardest. At its peak, Duquesne Light had more than 300,000 customers affected while West Penn Power, with a much broader coverage area, topped out at about 200,000 customers without service.
“As our crews have been restoring the more than 325,000 customers affected by the storm, they have continued to discover more extensive damage to some customers and the circuits. Additionally, the weather events experienced over the past week since the storm have contributed to this delay,” Duquesne Light said in a statement Tuesday.
Duquesne Light will send emails and automated calls to the customers who will be impacted by the more extensive repairs, the statement said.
According to West Penn Power spokesman Todd Meyers, the last storm-related customer outage was restored at 9:10 a.m. Tuesday.
Though First Energy Corp., West Penn’s parent company, still listed a few hundred outages as of 9:45 p.m. Tuesday, Meyers said these were unrelated to the storm.
Permanent repairs to come
Some of these repairs, Meyers said, were temporary measures to quickly restore electricity to customers, but more permanent steps will be ongoing throughout the spring and summer. Meyers said crews will take steps such as trimming tree limbs to mitigate future damage.
“There’s going to be a lot of cleanup to do after this storm,” he said.
The weeklong repair effort, Meyers said, was a “tremendous effort” involving thousands of line workers from more than 18 states.
The vast majority of Duquesne Light customers still without electricity — around 4,400 — live in Pittsburgh ZIP codes, both part of the city and surrounding communities.
That’s in addition to around 1,000 customers in North Hills communities such as Hampton, Shaler, McCandless, Pine, Richland, as well as Indiana and West Deer townships, who remain without power. The company said in a statement Tuesday night that fewer than 1,000 current customer outages are directly related to last week’s storm. A message on Duquesne Light’s website projects that all storm-related outages will be restored by 11 p.m. Wednesday.
Hampton School District returned to the classroom Monday, while Shaler Area and Fox Chapel areas only resumed normal operations Tuesday morning.