Fire/Rescue News - Power restored to most Atlantic County homes after weekend storm

By MICHAEL CLARK Staff Writer | Posted: Monday, March 15, 2010 | 1 comment

About 400 Atlantic County residents remain without power Monday, and some might not get it back until as late as Tuesday, a spokesman for Atlantic City Electric said today.

The outages are the result of this weekend's severe storm and high winds. At the height of Saturday's storm, 42,000 customers were affected by outages, said Matt Likovich, a spokesman for the company.....Continued Reading

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The utility called in crews from its sister company, Delmarva Power, to deal with the outages.

"We had extensive damage to the system," said Likovich.

Likovich said crews traditionally focus first on anything affecting public health and safety, but did not have any specific details of problems in that area. Then, crews will tackle the areas that will bring back electricity to the largest number of customers.

"If you live in downtown Atlantic City, you're probably going to get your power on quicker than someone who lives on a farm," he said. "It's difficult, though, because you're exerting the same amount of time to get one or two people back that you're exerting to restore thousands of people."

Outages affected hundreds of thousands of residents of northern New Jersey, where hundreds of people were being evacuated from their homes as swollen rivers flooded neighborhoods.

Public Service Electric & Gas reported about 156,000 customers without power.

To see Atlantic City Electric's restoration procedures, go to: http://www.atlanticcityelectric.com/home/emergency/restore/