 NEW
YORK (Reuters) - More than 335,000 residents of the Southern U.S.
remained without electricity early Thursday after a Christmas
Day ice storm and record snowfall battered the region this week,
according to local utilities.
More than
60,000 residents of east Texas, Arkansas and northwest Louisiana
were still without power on Thursday after nearly two inches of
ice snapped tree limbs and downed transmission lines, a spokesman
for AEP-Southwestern Electric Power Co. told Reuters.
One of the
hardest hit towns was Texarkana, on the Texas-Arkansas border,
where about 27,000 customers have been in the dark since Monday
night, AEP-SWEPCO company spokesman Scott McCloud said.
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 American Electric Power Co. .
At the peak
of the outage on Tuesday evening, 37,000 customers in Texarkana
and more than 89,000 customers in AEP-SWEPCO's service area were
without power, McCloud said.
"We are
making some progress on the transmission lines. We have 39 wooden
poles down on the ground and six steel towers that are down. We
are hoping to get through another night without more (weather)
problems,'' McCloud said.
Fifty two
of the company's transmission lines locked out, making it impossible
to get power into the cities that lacked it, McCloud said.
He added that
the company was holding to its January 9 restoration target date,
two weeks after the storm hit.
"That
is for all customers that can actually take power...even when
we reach that point there may be some homes that are so severely
damaged that they just haven't been repaired to the point where
we can get them back in service again,'' McCloud said.
A spokesman
for Oklahoma Gas & Electric Co. (OG&E) said 63,000 of
its customers remained without power on Thursday, down from as
many as 89,000 on Wednesday.
"This
was the worst winter event for our company in 13 years,'' OG&E's
Tim Hartley said.
"We've
got sunshine and pretty favorable conditions, except it's still
cold. We expect to make some more headway on shrinking the number
toward zero today,'' Hartley said, adding that there was still
no estimate on when all customers would have power restored.
OG&E,
the largest electric utility in Oklahoma, is a unit of OGE Energy
Corp. which serves 700,000 electricity customers in the state
and part of western Arkansas.
"Some
people may be off for a few days. It's not just all victory, there
are some spotty setbacks in some locations,'' Hartley said, adding
that temperatures have not risen above freezing for days.
TXU Electric
& Gas was reported to have 25,000 customers in northeast Texas
without power on Thursday with most of the outages there caused
by trees falling on power lines. The utility, a unit of TXU Corp.,
has 2.6 million customers in the Lone Star State.
In Arkansas,
Entergy Corp. said 187,000 of its customers remained without power,
down from a peak of about 200,000 early Tuesday. The New Orleans,
La.-based company delivers electricity to over 2.5 million customers
in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.
"The
working conditions are very difficult,'' the Entergy spokesman
said. "It will be seven to 10 days before the majority of
(the customers) are back on.''
Most of the
outages in the Entergy service territory were caused by icy tree
branches falling on power lines, the spokesman said.
Dozens of
counties in the region declared emergencies because of the storm,
responsible for a reported 19 deaths, many due to traffic accidents
on ice-covered roads.
According
to some reports, the storm knocked out power to nearly a half-million
homes and business and stranded many holiday travelers. The Christmas
Day storm was preceded by an ice storm on December 13 that plagued
the entire south-central U.S. with numerous power outages.
More rain
was expected Thursday into Friday in the Southeast with snow showers
expected in the Plains and northern Texas Saturday and Sunday,
Weather Services Corp (WSC) said.
Temperatures
in the region are expected to range 5-15 degrees Fahrenheit below
normal Thursday, warming slightly to 3-8 below on Friday and Saturday,
then dipping back to 2-18 below on Sunday.
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