 NEW
YORK (Reuters) - More than 89,000 residents of east Texas, Arkansas
and northwest Louisiana remained without electricity on Wednesday
after an ice storm battered the region on Christmas Day, a spokesman
for AEP-Southwestern Electric Power Co. said.
The hardest
hit towns were New Boston and Dekalb in Texas and Texarkana on
the Texas-Arkansas border, where about 36,000 customers have been
in the dark since Monday night, AEP-SWEPCO company spokesman Scott
McCloud told Reuters.
At the peak
of the outage, Tuesday night at about 5 p.m. CST, 94,000 customers
were without power, McCloud said.
``We hope
to make some progress today. We finally had the freezing rain
stop. We need to get those transmission lines rebuilt in Arkansas,''
McCloud said.
``Fifty two
transmission lines locked out, that's the main cause, and we can't
get power into the cities,'' he added.
The storm
was preceded by an ice storm on December 13 that plagued the entire
Southeast with numerous power outages.
McCloud said
1,100 employees including tree crews and line crews were now dedicated
to storm recovery and that number would continue to go up, but
restoration could take up to two weeks in some areas.
With more
sleet and snow possible in the region tonight, McCloud said much
of the work could not be finished until the storm system moved
out of the region on Thursday.
Weather Services
Corp. (WSC) said temperatures in the Southeast would range 8-15
degrees Fahrenheit below normal Wednesday, warming slightly to
3-8 below on Thursday and dipping back to 5-10 below Friday and
Saturday.
Freezing rain
will remain in some areas at least through early Thursday.
Winter storm
warnings and weather advisories remained in effect throughout
the Texas Panhandle and much of the Southeast today.
According
to some reports, the storm knocked out power to nearly a half-million
homes and businesses and stranded holiday travelers throughout
the region.
The weather
caused numerous accidents and was responsible for nine traffic
deaths in Arkansas.
AEP-SWEPCO
serves more than 426,000 customers in northwest Louisiana, northeast
Texas and western Arkansas.
It is an operating
company of Columbus, Ohio-based AEP which owns and operates more
than 38,000 megawatts of generating capacity, providing retail
electricity to more than nine million customers worldwide.
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