DELAWARE - Power crews have restored electricity to 40,000 homes since the winter storm began Sunday, with 20,000 of those homes coming back online overnight, according to an update from the utility at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday.
Delaware Electric Cooperative said crews along with DelDOT and local farmers, worked to clear roads, allowing utility teams to better assess damage across the system. Engineers now say the damage is more extensive than initially believed, particularly in rural areas of the service territory, meaning restoration could take longer than expected.
Additional crews from several Virginia utilities arrived overnight and are working across the system Tuesday, said the co-op. Delaware contractors have also been called in to assist with power restoration.
Crews are working on the last major circuit outages affecting thousands of members in the Angola and Broadkill areas. Many homes in those communities are expected to have service restored later Tuesday.
Outside of those areas, crews are responding to roughly 800 separate damage reports across the service territory. The problems include hundreds of downed trees and power lines and more than a dozen broken poles. The outages range from a single home to a few hundred homes at a time.
The utility said it hopes to restore power to about 10,000 additional homes by Tuesday evening, but outages are likely to continue into Wednesday and possibly Thursday.
With hundreds of damage reports still active, the utility said it cannot provide individualized restoration times.
"This is the worst outage event we’ve experienced since the 1994 ice storm and, for many members, this is the longest they have been without power," said the utility. "These types of storms are rare. When they do hit, they cause extensive damage to our system."
The utility also noted that its outage map may group smaller outages into larger ones during widespread events, meaning individual outages may not appear separately after being reported. The outage map in the DEC Connect App may not reflect live data, but current outages can be online.