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 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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