Across the region it's still some in the dark, others not

A Lewis Tree crew from New York clear debris from Nutes Road Milton in preparation for power crews to continue the restoration process. (Rochester Voice photo)

Power restoration crews continued to work to getting the lights back on throughout the Northern Seacoast on Wednesday with substantial strides made throughout the region, though Lebanon continued to lag far behind surrounding towns.

In Rochester as of this morning, only .6 percent of customers were still without power, while in Milton 7 percent are still in the dark.

In Lebanon, meanwhile, half of its 3,100 households were still powerless, with an estimated restore time noted on the CMP website of 10 p.m. on Saturday.

A CMP dispatcher today, however, told The Rochester Voice that while the ETA for power isn't till Saturday night, it's more than likely that many of those 1,500 or so without it will see it restored prior to that.

"That 10 p.m. time is when we expect to have all of Lebanon back on line," the dispatcher said. "It's probable many will get it back before then."

CMP said on Wednesday that it had restored power to nearly 65 percent of the customers who lost service after the wind and rain storm tore through the state earlier this week. By 10 p.m. Wednesday, outages had dropped to an estimated 154,000 customer accounts from a peak of 404,000 at midday Monday.

"We had another day of great progress restoring power and keeping our workers and the public safe," said CMP President and CEO Sara Burns. "No storm in our history has left us with this many outages, not even the ice storm of 1998. The good news is while it took three weeks to restore service following the ice storm, recovery from this one will be much, much quicker."

CMP started Wednesday with a storm recovery workforce of 1,800 people and added about 300 more over the course of the day. Additional crews will hit the road this morning, and more are on their way from other states.

The company is also working to post more specific restoration information on Outage Central section of its web site, a CMP press release stated on Wednesday..